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

[Sasha Levin <levinsasha928@gmail.com>]

On 07/24/2012 02:28 PM, Gleb Natapov wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 02:26:33PM +0200, Sasha Levin wrote:
>> On 07/24/2012 09:44 AM, Gleb Natapov wrote:
>>> On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 10:32:39PM +0200, Sasha Levin wrote:
>>>> As it was discussed recently, there's currently no way for the guest to notify
>>>> the host about panics. Further more, there's no reasonable way to notify the
>>>> host of other critical events such as an OOM kill.
>>>>
>>>> This short patch series introduces a new device named virtio-notifier which
>>>> does two simple things:
>>>>
>>>>  1. Provide a simple interface for the guest to notify the host of critical
>>> To get early OOPSes virtio will have to be compiled into the kernel. If
>>> your are so keen on using virtio for this though, why not just use
>>> dedicated virtio serial channel?
>>
>> Let's separate between having log for these events and receiving notifications about them.
>>
>> For the log part, I can already run a simple serial console to dump everything somewhere. I'm more concerned about having notifications about something critical happening when the guest is already up and running.
>>
> I am talking about notifications. Run your notification protocol over
> dedicated virtio-serial channel. Logs goes to virtio-console as you've
> said.

Ah, so just add another channel into virtio-serial to pass these notifications? Good idea - I'll look into it.