Hi, i am working on the jailhouse[1] project and am currently looking at inter-VM communication. We want to connect guests directly with virtual consoles based on shared memory. The code complexity in the hypervisor should be minimal, it should just make the shared memory discoverable and provide a signaling mechanism. We would like to reuse virtio so that Linux-guests will eventually just work without having to patch them. Having looked at virtio it seems to be focused on host<->guest communication and does not consider direct guest<->guest communication. I.e. the queues use guest-physical addressing, which is only meaningful for the guest and the host. In a first prototype i implemented a ivshmem[2] device for the hypervisor. That way we can share memory between virtual machines. Ivshmem is nice and simple but does not seem to be used anymore. And it does not define higher level devices, like a console. At this point i could: - define a console on top of ivshmem - see how i can get a virtio console to work between guests on shared memory Is anyone already using something like that? I guess zero-copy virtio devices in Xen would be a similar case. I read a suggestion from may 2010 to introduce a virtio feature bit for shared memory (VIRTIO_F_RING_SHMEM_ADDR). But that did not make it into the virtio-spec. regards, Henning [1] jailhouse https://github.com/siemens/jailhouse [2] ivshmem https://gitorious.org/nahanni -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
