Re: AW: Re: [Qemu-devel] VMport patch

[Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

> > I think it would be great to maintain compatibility with the binary-only
> > versions of the vm tools though.
>
> But you're changing the semantics of the x86 instruction set.  You
> potentially break a real operating system.  It also eliminates the
> possibility of nesting with something like kqemu because you can't trap
> all PIO operations.

Maybe have a commandline flag, and have it switched off by default?  Or, even 
better, would be to detect valid vmware tools behaviour and switch it on iff 
that happened; the default being to behave normally for OSes that aren't 
running the VMware tools..

Cheers,
Mark

> Regards,
>
> Anthony Liguori
>
> > Regards,
> >
> > Alex
> >
> > ----- Ursprüngliche Nachricht -----
> > Von: Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>
> > Gesendet: Sonntag, 20. Januar 2008 22:40
> > An: qemu-devel@nongnu.org
> > Betreff: Re: [Qemu-devel] VMport patch
> >
> > Filip Navara wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> the current version of QEMU emulates the VMware backdoor I/O port and
> >> it works quite well. Unfortunately it doesn't emulate the VMware
> >> behavior of ignoring the I/O permissions when accessing this special
> >> port. The attached patch corrects it. It's important to ignore the
> >> permissions, so that user mode VMware tools can communicate to the
> >> backdoor. =
> >
> > I really dislike that VMware relies on this.  It's very hard to
> > implement in kqemu or KVM.  I think it would be better to modify
> > open-vm-tools than to modify QEMU.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Anthony Liguori
> >
> >> Best regards,
> >> Filip Navara



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