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

[Anthony Liguori]

Amit Shah wrote:
> On (Mon) Aug 10 2009 [11:59:31], Anthony Liguori wrote:
>   
>> However, as I've mentioned repeatedly, the reason I won't merge  
>> virtio-serial is that it duplicates functionality with virtio-console.   
>> If the two are converged, I'm happy to merge it.  I'm not opposed to  
>> having more functionality.
>>     
>
> The guest code sort-of ends up looking like this after merging
> virtio_console into virtio_serial. Diff is against virtio_serial in my
> git tree, but that should be pretty close to the last submission I made
> at
>
> http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/39335/
>
> or the tree at
>
> git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/amit/vs-kernel.git
>
> I've merged bits from virtio_console.c into virtio_serial.c. If needed,
> virtio_serial can be renamed to virtio_console. The VIRITIO_ID also
> needs to change to that of virtio_console's.
>
> Similar changes are needed for userspace.
>
> Since there's support for only one console as of now, I've assigned port
> #2 as the console port so that we hook into hvc when a port is found at
> that location.
>
> One issue that crops up for put_chars: a copy of the buffer to be sent
> has to be made as we don't wait for host to ack the buffer before we
> move on.
>
> The biggest loss so far is Rusty's excellent comments: they will have to
> be reworked and added for the whole of the new file.
>
> Is this approach acceptable?
>   

I think we want to keep virtio_console.c and definitely continue using 
the virtio_console id.  It looks like you are still creating character 
devices as opposed to tty devices.  Is this just an incremental step or 
are you choosing to not do tty devices for a reason (as if so, what's 
that reason)?

Regards,

Anthony Liguori