[Qemu-devel] Re: virtio-serial: An interface for host-guest communication

[Gerd Hoffmann]

On 08/10/09 16:27, Anthony Liguori wrote:

> I think my fundamental argument boils down to two points. 1) we should
> not require new guest drivers unless we absolutely have to

Allow guest drivers is fine though I guess?

> 2) we should
> always do things in userspace unless we absolutely have to do things in
> the kernel.

Wrong.  There are often good reasons to do stuff in kernel, even if you 
can do it in userspace too.

> Adding new kernel drivers breaks support for enterprise Linux distros.
> Adding a userspace daemon does not. Windows device drivers require
> signing which is very difficult to do. There's a huge practical
> advantage in not requiring guest drivers.

Ok, so the virtio-serial + usbserial combo should work well then I think.

If you have guest drivers you'll go the virtio-serial route.
If you don't have guest drivers you can go the usbserial route, either 
via /dev/ttyUSB or via libusb.

We can also have a libvmchannel as abstraction layer on top of this.

cheers,
   Gerd