Re: A set of "standard" virtual devices?

[Anthony Liguori]

Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> Andi Kleen wrote:
> > The implementation wouldn't need to use PCI at all. There wouldn't 
> > even need to be PCI like registers internally. Just a pci device
> > with an ID somewhere in sysfs. PCI with unique IDs
> > is just a convenient and well established key into the driver module
> > collection. Once you have the right driver it can do what it wants.
>
> But I understood hpa's suggestion to mean that there would be a standard
> PCI interface for a hardware RNG, and a single linux driver for that
> device, which all hypervisors would be expected to implement.  But
> that's only reasonable if the virtualization environment has some notion
> of PCI to expose to the Linux guest.

The actual PCI bus could paravirtualized.  It's just a question of 
whether one reinvents a device discovery mechanism (like XenBus) or 
whether one piggy backs on existing mechanisms.

Furthermore, in the future, I strongly suspect that HVM will become much 
more important for Xen than PV and since that already has a PCI bus it's 
not really that big of a deal.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

>     J

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