Re: [Qemu-devel] KVM call minutes for Oct 19

Daniel P. Berrange
2010-10-20T13:19:32Z

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 08:02:07AM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> On 10/20/2010 03:21 AM, Alexander Graf wrote:
> >>Live snapshots
> >>- merge snapshot?
> >> - already supported, question about mgmt of snapshot chain
> >>- integrate with fsfreeze (and windows alternative)
> >>
> >>Guest Agent
> >>- have one coming RSN (poke Anthony for details)
> >>
> >Would there be a chance to have a single agent for everyone, so that we
> >actually form a Qemu agent instead of a dozen individual ones? I'm mainly
> >thinking Spice here.
> >
>
> Our main design points are to keep the code simple with few dependencies
> and to provide interfaces that have the maximum amount of flexibility.
>
> Having a single agent (not an agent framework) is important if we want
> these interfaces to be ubiquitous. This really means that the guest
> agent should be part of the QEMU source tree IMHO so that there is
> always a standard version of the agent.

The thinking with Matahari is that there is significant overlap between
agent requirements for a physical and virtual host, so it aims to provide
an agent that works everywhere, whether virtualized or not. All that need
change is the communication transport (TCP vs VirtIO Serial vs legacy
serial vs some other data channel), and enable/disable certain agent
services according to deployment scenario. Once you go to a more general
purpose agent in this way, then it doesn't make such sense to put it all
in the QEMU tree.

Regards,
Daniel
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