Re: [Qemu-devel] virtio-serial: A guest <-> host interface for simple communication

["Christian Bornträger" <borntraeger@de.ibm.com>]

Am Dienstag 23 Juni 2009 16:16:13 schrieb Paul Brook:
> > I did some work on virtio-console, since kvm on s390 does not provide any
> > other. I dont think we should mix two different types of devices into one
> > driver. The only thing that these drivers have in common, is the fact
> > that there are two virtqueues, piping data (single bytes or larger
> > chunks). So you could make the same argument with the first virtio_net
> > driver (the one before GSO) - which is obviously wrong. The common part
> > of the transport is already factored out to virtio_ring and the
> > transports.
>
> virtio-net is packet based, not stream based.

You can argue that virtio-console is also packet based. The input buffer can 
accept up to 4K in one buffer and the console code can also submit larger chunks 
to virtio_console.

> > In addition there are two ABIs involved: a userspace ABI (/dev/hvc0) and
> > a guest/host ABI for this console. (and virtio was not meant to be a
> > KVM-only interface, that we can change all the time). David A. Wheeler's
> > 'SLOCCount' gives me 141 lines of code for virtio_console.c. I am quite
> > confident that the saving we could achieve by merging these two drivers
> > is not worth the hazzle.
>
> AFAICS the functionality provided is exactly the same. The host API is
> identical, and the guest userspace API only has trivial differences (which
> could be eliminated with a simple udev rule). By my reading virtio-serial
> makes virtio-console entirely redundant.

How can you know, that the userspace API only has trivial differences, if the 
question below is not answered?

> > Discussion about merging the console code into this distracts from the
> > main problem: To get the interface and functionality right before it
> > becomes an ABI (is it /dev/ttyS, network like or is it something
> > completely different?).
>
> Ah, now that's a different question. I don't know what the requirements are
> for the higher level vmchannel interface. However I also don't care.

You should care, because it might have an impact if two serial lines are really 
the right solution for the vmchannel.

One thing that I forgot:
You should be warned that hvc_console sometimes can be a real PITA. A while ago 
I tried to change virtio_console to support more than one console and hotplug 
and failed to find a proper solution that can handle all the subtle  console/tty 
register/unregister combinations. You dont want to adopt new code to fit to 
hvc_console - leave it in virtio_console...