Hello,
As I've mentioned in previous discussion threads in the xen-devel
community, we are running Xen 4.17 (uprev to 4.18 in progress) on NXP
S32G automotive processors (Cortex-A53 cores) and we wanted to know more
about the support for various VirtIO device types in Xen.
In the Xen 4.17 release notes, the VirtIO standalone backends mentioned
as supported and tested are: virtio-disk, virtio-net, virtio-i2c and
virtio-gpio.
However, we've only managed to successfully set up and try some
use-cases with the virtio-disk standalone backend [0] (which Olexandr
provided) based on the virtio-mmio transport.
As such, we have a few questions, which we haven't been able to figure
out from the mailing list discussions and/or code:
1. Are there any plans for the virtio-disk repo to have a stable
version? Is it going to be long-term hosted and maintained in the
xen-troops github repo? Or was it just an one-time PoC implementation
and the strategy for future VirtIO devices will be based on a more generic
approach (i.e., without need for a specific standalone app)?
2. With regards to the other backends, we want to try out and provide PV
networking to a DomU based on virtio-net, but we haven't found any available
resources for it (e.g., the standalone backend implementation if needed for
control plane, configuration examples, presentations, demos, docs). Does it
rely on the QEMU virtio-net or vhost implementation? Are there any examples
on how to set it up? Any required Xen/Linux Kernel/QEMU versions?
3. What other VirtIO device types are there planned to be supported in Xen?
I'm supposing libxl will also need changes to accomodate new configuration
parameters for each of them. Or is there something I'm missing?
4. Also, while we're at it, are there any plans regarding SCMI
awareness for Xen (e.g., SCMI Mediator - where the RFC thread from 2022
seems discontinued)? Or is the preferred approach for sharing SCMI access
to guests through virtio-scmi?
Thank you very much for the support, once again, and we're also looking
forward to the progress on the rust-vmm initiative.
Regards,
Andrei Cherechesu,
NXP Semiconductors
[0] https://github.com/xen-troops/virtio-disk
