Re: [Xen-devel] xl PVUSB pass-through

[Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik@xxxxxx>]

On Thu, Mar 07, 2013 at 10:07:32AM +0000, George Dunlap wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 3:59 PM, Stefan <sstanisi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Good Morning:
> >
> > Our Xen clusters depend heavily on that feature. The lack of it prevents us
> > from transitioning to the new toolstack. Currently we use PVUSB to attach a
> > USB Smartcard reader through our dom0 (SLES 11 SP1) running on an HP Blade
> > Server with the Token mounted on an internal USB Port to our domU CA server
> > (SLES 11)
> >
> > I'd like to know how likely it is to make it to the next release. Does
> > anyone have a solution that doesn't require PVUSB? I'd like to give a hand
> > if that can help making PVUSB part of Xen 4.3.
> 
> For PVUSB to work for any particular VM, you need two things:
> * PVUSB kernel support in the guest VM and dom0 (or driver domain)
> * The toolstack has to know how to connect the two.
> 
> "Classic xen" kernels like those supported by SuSE have PVUSB support,
> and xend has support for setting up the connection.
> 
> So regarding PVUSB there are two tasks:
> 
> 1. Teach xl/libxl how to set up the connection
> 2. Port PVUSB to pvops kernels.
> 

PVUSB drivers have already been ported to pvops kernels,
and the PVUSB drivers can be found from Konrad's git repo.

What is missing is upstreaming the drivers.


> It sounds like the main thing you need is to have the xl/libxl
> support.  This should just be a matter of looking at what xend does in
> setting up the PVUSB connection, and duplicating that in xl.  If you'd
> be willing to give that a try, that would be great -- we'd love to
> help out.
> 
> If you've never submitted patches before,
> http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Submitting_Xen_Patches has some helpful
> advice.
> 
> If for some reason PVUSB doesn't make it into 4.3, another option you
> can explore is running your VMs in PVHVM mode; xl will definitely
> support USB pass-through for HVM domains in 4.3.
> 


-- Pasi


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