Re: [PATCH/RFC 7/9] Virtual network guest device driver

Gregory Haskins
2007-05-16T18:57:10Z

>>> On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 2:39 PM, in message <464B4FEB.7070300-r/Jw6+rmf7HQT0dZR+AlfA@public.gmane.org>,
Anthony Liguori <aliguori-r/Jw6+rmf7HQT0dZR+AlfA@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Gregory Haskins wrote:
>>>>> On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 1:28 PM, in message <464B3F20.4030904-r/Jw6+rmf7HQT0dZR+AlfA@public.gmane.org>,
>>>>>
>> Anthony Liguori <aliguori-r/Jw6+rmf7HQT0dZR+AlfA@public.gmane.org> wrote:
>>
>>> What do you think about a socket interface? I'm not sure how discovery
>>> would work yet, but there are a few PV socket implementations for Xen at
>>> the moment.
>>>
>>
>> FYI: The work I am doing is exactly that. I am going to extend host- based
> unix domain sockets up to the KVM guest. Not sure how well it will work yet,
> as I had to lay the LAPIC work down first for IO- completion.
>>
>
> Do you plan on introducing a new address family in the guest?

Well, since I had to step back and lay some infrastructure groundwork I haven't vetted this approach yet...so its possible what I am about to say is relatively naive: But my primary application is to create a guest-kernel to host IVMC. For that you can just think of the guest as any other process on the host, and it will just use the sockets normally as any host-process would. There might be some thunking that has to happen to deal with gpa vs va, etc, but otherwise its a standard consumer. If you want to extend IVMC up to guest-userspace, I think making some kind of new socket family makes sense in the guests stack. PF_VIRT like someone else suggested, for instance. But since I dont need this type of IVMC I haven't really thought about this too much.

-Greg