Hello, As I've mentioned in previous discussion threads in the xen-devel community, we are running Xen 4.17 (uprev to 4.18 in progress) on NXP S32G automotive processors (Cortex-A53 cores) and we wanted to know more about the support for various VirtIO device types in Xen.
In the Xen 4.17 release notes, the VirtIO standalone backends mentioned as supported and tested are: virtio-disk, virtio-net, virtio-i2c and virtio-gpio. However, we've only managed to successfully set up and try some use-cases with the virtio-disk standalone backend [0] (which Olexandr provided) based on the virtio-mmio transport. As such, we have a few questions, which we haven't been able to figure out from the mailing list discussions and/or code: 1. Are there any plans for the virtio-disk repo to have a stable version? Is it going to be long-term hosted and maintained in the xen-troops github repo? Or was it just an one-time PoC implementation and the strategy for future VirtIO devices will be based on a more generic approach (i.e., without need for a specific standalone app)? 2. With regards to the other backends, we want to try out and provide PV networking to a DomU based on virtio-net, but we haven't found any available resources for it (e.g., the standalone backend implementation if needed for control plane, configuration examples, presentations, demos, docs). Does it rely on the QEMU virtio-net or vhost implementation? Are there any examples on how to set it up? Any required Xen/Linux Kernel/QEMU versions? 3. What other VirtIO device types are there planned to be supported in Xen? I'm supposing libxl will also need changes to accomodate new configuration parameters for each of them. Or is there something I'm missing? 4. Also, while we're at it, are there any plans regarding SCMI awareness for Xen (e.g., SCMI Mediator - where the RFC thread from 2022 seems discontinued)? Or is the preferred approach for sharing SCMI access to guests through virtio-scmi? Thank you very much for the support, once again, and we're also looking forward to the progress on the rust-vmm initiative. Regards, Andrei Cherechesu, NXP Semiconductors [0] https://github.com/xen-troops/virtio-disk