This patch allows passing of a virtio_blk drive
serial number from qemu into a guest's virtio_blk
driver, and provides a means to access the serial
number from a guest's userspace.

Equivalent functionality currently exists for IDE
and SCSI, however it is not yet implemented for
virtio.  Scenarios exist where guest code relies
on a unique drive serial number to correctly
identify the machine environment in which it
exists.

The following two patches implement the above

     qemu-vblk-serial.patch

which provides the qemu missing bits to interpret
a '-drive .. serial=XYZ ..' flag, and

     virtio_blk-serial.patch

which extracts this information and make it
available to guest userspace via ioctl.

Attached to this patch header is a trivial example
program which retrieves the serial number from
guest userspace.

The above patches are relative to kvm-84 and
2.6.28 respectively.

-john


-- 
john.cooper@third-harmonic.com