Re: A set of "standard" virtual devices?

Arnd Bergmann
2007-04-03T21:52:56Z

On Tuesday 03 April 2007, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> That said, something like USB is probably the best bet for this kind of
> low-performance device.  I think.  Not that I really know anything about
> USB.

USB has the disadvantage that it is more complex than PCI and requires
significantly more code to simulate on the host side.

On the plus side, I think it should be possible to implement a virtual
USB host on s390, which is not possible with PCI, but that again takes
a lot of work to implement.

One interesting aspect of the PS3 hypervisor is that some of the
low-speed interfaces are implemented as a virtual UART, meaning
something that only has read and write operations and uses an
interrupt for flow control. The implementation in
drivers/ps3/vuart.c is probably more complex than what we want
as a generic transport mechanism, but simply having a bidirectional
data stream sounds like an ideal abstraction for the "simple"
case. Some more or less obvious users of this include:

- console
- additional tty
- random
- slow network (using ppp)
- printer
- watchdog
- hid (e.g. mouse)
- system management (like ps3)
- fast network (in combination with
shared memory segment)

The transport can be hypervisor specific, e.g. there could be
a virtual PCI serial port on kvm, an hcall interface on the ps3
and a virtual CTC on s390 (kidding), while all of them can have
the same kind of hardware _behind_ the serial connection.