Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] VM-Tool: C-based Xen management tools

[Mark Williamson <Mark.Williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> >For comparison, do you know what abstraction other systems do?  Do they
> > assign ports or associate devices with VMs?
>
> Not sure.  The only thing I know that does USB virtualization is VMware
> and I've not played with that feature (I think it's a relatively new
> feature).

I think they've been able to do some kind of USB passthrough for a while (not 
sure how long) but the support for isochronous is only available in their 
current beta.

> udev/namedev have to deal with this to ensure that devices have a unique
> (and consistent) /dev entry.  It currently uses a tiered approach to
> determine exactly what the device is.  It's not perfect but it works
> reasonably well.  The best link I could find explaining it with a quick
> google is:
>
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/udev-guide.xml

I'll check it out, thanks.

Thinking about it, we could keep the device identification logic in userspace, 
which would be cleaner.  The tools could then just tell the backend to claim 
the device on a given port.  There'd be a few driver tweaks required to make 
it all work together but this may well be a cleaner approach.

> A GUI would be really handy for PCI/USB because it would provide an easy
> way to pick devices by name (instead of specifying an series of
> identifiers/bus/etc in the config).

Yes, I thought so to.  A general admin GUI is on our todo list locally but 
AFAIK nobody is working on it right now.  Every so often I poke the XenSV web 
interface to make sure it's still working.

> I agree completely.  I'm currently adding proper documentation to
> vm-tools but after that's done I'll add USB virtualization and try to
> implement a mechanism to select by device ID and push out another
> version to the list.

Cool!  

Cheers,
Mark


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