Re: Extending virtio_console to support multiple ports

Rusty Russell
2009-09-21T05:20:53Z

On Tue, 1 Sep 2009 02:07:05 am Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Amit Shah wrote:
> Functionally speaking, both virtio-console and virtio-serial do the same
> thing. In fact, virtio-console is just a subset of virtio-serial.
>
> If there are problems converging the two drivers in Linux, then I
> suggest you have two separate driver modules in Linux. That would
> obviously be rejected for Linux though because you cannot have two
> drivers for the same device. Why should qemu have a different policy?

I've been on leave, cheerfully not thinking about this.

AFAICT, a console and serial are very similar, so it makes sense to merge
them. But a serial port doesn't have framing either; if it does, it's
something else.

And generally using virtio framing in upper layers is a mistake (one we've
made in the qemu implementations, but that's unfortunate).

Thanks,
Rusty.