ron minnich wrote: > Hi Anthony, > > I still feel that "how about a socket interface" is still focused on > the "how to implement", and not "what the interface should be".
Right. I'm not trying to answer that question ATM. There are a number of paravirt devices that would be useful in a virtual setting. For instance, a PV device for providing the guest with entropy and a shared PV clipboard. These devices should be simple but all current communication mechanisms are far too complicated. > I also > am not sure the socket system call interface is quite what we want, > although it's a neat idea. It's also not that portable outside the > "everything is a Linux variant" world. A filesystem interface certainly isn't very portable outside the POSIX world :-) > Once it is connected, we can move data. > > This is similar to your socket idea, but consider that: > o to see active vmics, I use 'ls' > o I don't have to create a new sockaddr address type > o I can control access with chmod > o I am seperating the interface from the implementation > o This is, of course, not really 'files', but in-memory data > structures; this can > (and will) be fast > o No binary data structures. > For different domains, even on the same machine, alignment rules etc. > are not > always the same -- I hit this when I ported Plan 9 to Xen, esp. back > when Xen > relied so heavily on gcc tricks such as __align__ and packed. Using > character strings > eliminates that problem. The interface you're proposing is almost functionally identical to a socket. In fact, once you open /data you've got an fd that you interact with in the same way as you would interact with a socket. It's not that there's an unique value for this sort of interface in virtualization; I don't think you're making that argument. Instead, you're making a general argument as to why this way of doing things is better than what Unix has been doing forever (with things like sockets). That's fine, I think you have a valid point, but that's a larger argument to have on LKML or at a conference. This isn't the place to shoe-horn this sort of thing. A socket interface would provide a simple, well-understood interface that few people in the Linux community would disagree with (it's already there for s390). It should also be easy enough to stream p9 over the socket so you can build these interfaces easily and continue your attempts to expose the world as a virtual filesystem :-) Regards, Anthony Liguori > This is, I think, the kind of thing Eric would also like to see, but > he can correct me. > Thanks > > ron ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ kvm-devel mailing list kvm-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/kvm-devel
