Re: Using VMChannel to communicate with the host.

[Dor Laor <dor.laor-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 07, 2007 at 04:44:30PM -0600, Cam Macdonell wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm trying to get a better understanding of VM-to-host communication 
>> that doesn't involve going over virtual networks.  I understand there 
>> are a couple of developments underway, but I just want to play around a 
>> better sense of things.   I think the current hypercall mechanism is the 
>> current way to do this using the -vmchannel option.  But, I'm not very 
>> experienced with PCI devices and their drivers so I need some help.  All 
>> I want to do is to communicate across a unix domain socket on the host. 
>>   Besides loading the hypercall module in the guest how do things needs 
>> to be configured on the host?
>>
>> Is there a simple tutorial or just a webpage with examples for how to do 
>> this?
>>     
>
> I'm going to suggest that a better way to do VM-to-host or VM-to-VM
> communication would be to write an OpenFabrics (www.openfabrics.org)
> driver that uses hypercalls. There is probably some gotcha I am not
> aware of, but I think this would allow direct userspace to userspace
> communication between a process running on a host, and a process running
> on a VM, while still maintaining isolation.
>
>   
Basically that's true but you need a host glue dirver to connect the two 
+ the hypercall implementation.
It can be easily added to KVM with a small cost.

BTW: does all windows guest will have the guest side driver implemented? 
Including XP, 2k, Vista?

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