On Saturday 22 September 2007, Rusty Russell wrote:
But now each virtio device has two "struct device"s, not one. And
you've made up a fictional bus to do it.
Yet for PCI systems, it really is a PCI device; exposing a second bus to
userspace just because we put a layer in our implementation is poor
form.
Perhaps this is the easiest way of doing it. But it's still wrong.
I think it's just a matter of perspective. In the model I'm advocating,
the PCI device is not the same as the virtio device but rather a virtio
host bridge, very much like USB or SATA works.
We could easily have multiple virtio devices behind one PCI device, but
since virtual PCI devices are cheap, a one-to-one mapping makes sense
for simplicity.