Re: [virtio] Re: [virtio-comment] *-over-virtio

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>]

Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com> writes:

> On Mon, Aug 05, 2013 at 12:22:06PM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
>> We seem to have a family of several devices that are rather simple on the virtio level. Some
>> identifying features include:
>> 
>>  * No real usage of the configuration space
>>  * No device features
>>  * No control vqs
>>  * Usually one, but possibly 2 vqs used for straightforward message passing outside the virtio
>> scope.
>> 
>> The use case is simple: use virtio as a simple transport for protocol specific messages, this
>> can pretty much go over any other transport exactly the same way.
>> 
>> Would it make sense to move their actual definition out of the spec and just reserve device
>> IDs for them there?
>
> Why don't they use virtio-serial or the new vsock from the start?  Both
> transports are built to support arbitrary protocols for tasks that don't
> need virtio device-level features.  Seems like the right fit instead of
> reserving unique virtio device IDs.

IMHO, anything that may be of interest across multiple guests and
multiple hypervisors should be considered for formal specification.

I don't think the answer should be to tunnel everything through
virtio-serial or vsock.  There's nothing wrong with simple virtio
devices.

A reasonable analogy is the HID specification for USB.  It supports a
very large number of often simple devices.  It's pretty useful to have
standard drivers for such devices because then there is no need for
vendor specific drivers.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

>
> Stefan
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe from this mail list, you must leave the OASIS TC that 
> generates this mail.  Follow this link to all your TCs in OASIS at:
> https://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/portal/my_workgroups.php