Re: A set of "standard" virtual devices?

H. Peter Anvin
2007-04-03T22:10:39Z

Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>
> 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.
>

Note that at least for PIO-based devices, there is nothing that says you
can't implement PCI over another transport, if you wish. It's really
just a very simple RPC protocol.

DMA is trickier, as it makes the data appear into the address space of
the guest in a way that is both device- and host-dependent (in the
presence of PCI domains, IOMMU etc.) There may be reason to avoid DMA
for that reason.

-hpa