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

Alexander Graf
2010-10-21T01:16:56Z

Am 21.10.2010 um 00:46 schrieb Dor Laor <dlaor@redhat.com>:

> On 10/20/2010 03:21 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>> On 10/20/2010 08:19 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> Actually, I don't think we want to have a common agent for physical and
>> virtual systems.
>>
>> The requirements are actually very different. The virtual agent exists
>> solely to support hypervisor functionality. Not to provide general
>> purpose system management support.
>
> True although there is much in common and there are several api for hypervisor only. I think it's sensible to ask for such.

I'm not sure it's worth the inflexibility.

>
> IMHO we can't put the complete guest agent code in qemu:
> - There would be OS specific code like windows and windows only
> interfaces (WMI)
> - Agents can benefits from guest frameworks like dbus. Will we take
> dbus into qemu or re-write it ourselves?

I don't understand the argument. We have plenty of binary blobs in qemu. Why not gave the guest agent be one of them, having the source in the qemu tree nevertheless?

>
> I agree that some agent code for basic stuff like live snapshot sync with the filesystem is small enough and worth to host within qemu.
> Maybe we do need more than one project?
>

No, please. That's exactly what I don't want to see. The libvirt/qemu/virt-man split is killing us already. How is this going to become with 20 driver packs for the guest?

Alex

>>