Re: [RFC 0/2] virtio: provide a way for host to monitor critical events in the device

[Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>]

On Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:01:59 +0200, Sasha Levin <levinsasha928@gmail.com> wrote:
> virtio on it's own was introduced to help solve the fragmentation
> around virtualized devices, so I don't think that the main purpose of
> doing virtio drivers is due to any performance benefits virtio may
> provide.

There's one argument in your favor (with my Linaro hat on): ARM wants a
virtio reboot button, which would look remarkably similar.  There's no
standard ARM hardware for this.

So a more generalized virtio-event device might make sense.  But there
are almost an infinite number of guest events we might want: panics,
oom, low memory, stuck devices, deadlock, etc, etc.  I'm concerned about
trying to standardize them.  If we include a unspecified free-form
string, people will end up relying on the contents.  If we add a feature
bit for every new event, we'll end up running out of feature bits :)

CC'ing Amit for opinion over how much of this should be done via
virtio-serial.

Cheers,
Rusty.