Re: [Qemu-devel] converging around a single guest agent

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

On 11/16/2011 06:07 AM, Alon Levy wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 08:53:45AM +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 11/15/2011 11:39 PM, Ayal Baron wrote:
>>>
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>>>> If you want to talk about convergence, the discussion should start
>>>> around
>>>> collecting requirements.  We can then figure out if the two sets of
>>>> requirements
>>>> are strictly overlapping or if there are any requirements that are
>>>> fundamentally
>>>> in opposition.
>>>
>>> Agreed.
>>>
>>> So vdsm guest agent goal is to ease administration of VMs.  This is not saying much as it is quite broad so I will list what is provided today and some things we need to add:
>>>
>>> Assistance in VM life-cycle:
>>> "desktopShutdown" - Shuts the VM down gracefully from within the guest.
>>> "quiesce" - does not exist today.  This is definitely a requirement for us.
>>>
>>> SSO support for spice sessions (automatically login into guest OS using provided credentials):
>>> "desktopLock" - lock current session, used when spice session gets disconnected / before giving a new user access to spice session
>>> "desktopLogin"
>>> "desktopLogoff"
>>> In addition, guest reports relevant info (currently active user, session state)
>>>
>>> Monitoring and inventory:
>>> currently agent sends info periodically, which includes a lot of info which should probably be broken down and served upon request. Info includes -
>>> - memory usage
>>> - NICs info (name, hw, inet, inet6)
>>> - appslist (list of installed apps / rpms)
>>> - OS type
>>> - guest hostname
>>> - internal file systems info (path, fs type, total space, used space)
>>>
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> If we're gathering requirements and trying to come up with one agent to rule them all, don't forget
>> about VDI and the Spice agent. Currently the spice agent handles the following:
>>
>> 1) Paravirtual mouse (needed to get mouse coordinates right with multi monitor setups)

I thought there was wide agreement that pv mouse should be extracted from the 
guest agent into its own driver.

>> 2) Send client monitor configuration, so that the guest os can adjust its resolution
>>     (and number and place of monitors) to match the client

I also wonder if this should be part of QXL?

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

>> 3) Copy and paste in a platform neutral manner, if anyone wishes to add this to another agent
>>     please, please contact us (me) first. This is easy to get wrong (we went through 2 revisions
>>     of the protocol for this).
>> 4) Allow the client to request the guest to tone down the bling (for low spec clients)
>>
> As long as we are collecting requirements, even if as Ayal said merging
> spice requirements is not the OP's intent:
>
>   5) Window management - Agent can set location of windows, report
>   existing running applications and locations, get notified when a new
>   window is created. For exposing individual applications, this is a
>   future requirement.
>
>> Notes:
>> 1) All of these are client<->  guest communication, rather then the host<->  guest communication
>> which the other agents seem to focus on.
>>
>> 2) Getting copy paste right requires a system level guest agent process as well as a per user
>> session agent process.
>>
>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Hans
>>
>