Hi all, I have sent this mail last week, but It may be filtered to Spam, so I send again. Linaro has developed the foundation for the new Android Emulator code base based on a fairly recent upstream QEMU code base, when we re-based the code, we updated the device model to be more virtio based (for example the drives are now virtio block devices). The aim of this is to minimise the delta between upstream and the Android specific changes to QEMU. One Android emulator specific feature is the AndroidPipe. AndroidPipe is a communication channel between the guest system and the emulator itself. Guest side device node can be opened by multi processes at the same time with different service name. It has a de-multiplexer on the QEMU side to figure out which service the guest actually wanted, so the first write after opening device node is the service name guest wanted, after QEMU backend receive this service name, create a corresponding communication channel, initialize related component, such as file descriptor which connect to the host socket serve. So each opening in guest will create a separated communication channel. We can create a separate device for each service type, however some services, such as the OpenGL emulation, need to have multiple open channels at a time. This is currently not possible using the virtserialport which can only be opened once. Current virtserialport can not be opened by multiple processes at the same time. I know virtserialport has provided buffers beforehand to cache data from host to guest, so even there is no guest read, data can still be transported from host to guest kernel, when there is guest read request, just copy cached data to user space. We are not sure clearly whether virtio can support multi-open-per-device semantics or not, followings are just our initial ideas about adding multi-open-per-device feature to a port: * when there is a open request on a port, kernel will allocate a portclient with new id and __wait_queue_head to track this request * save this portclient in file->private_data * guest kernel pass this portclient info to QEMU and notify that the port has been opened * QEMU backend will create a clientinfo struct to track this communication channel, initialize related component * we may change the kernel side strategy of allocating receiving buffers in advance to a new strategy, that is when there is a read request: - allocate a port_buffer, put user space buffer address to port_buffer.buf, share memory to avoid memcpy - put both portclient id(or portclient addrss) and port_buffer.buf to virtqueue, that is the length of buffers chain is 2 - kick to notify QEMU backend to consume read buffer - QEMU backend read portclient info firstly to find the correct clientinfo, then read host data directly into virtqueue buffer to avoid memcpy - guest kernel will wait(similarly in block mode, because the user space address has been put into virtqueue) until QEMU backend has consumed buffer(all data/part data/nothing have been sent to host side) - if nothing has been read from host and file descriptor is in block mode, read request will wait through __wait_queue_head until host side is readable * above read logic may change the current behavior of transferring data to guest kernel even without guest user read * when there is a write request: - allocate a port_buffer, put user space buffer address to port_buffer.buf, share memory to avoid memcpy - put both portclient id(or portclient addrss) and port_buffer.buf to virtqueue, the length of buffers chain is 2 - kick to notify QEMU backend to consume write buffer - QEMU backend read portclient info firstly to find the correct clientinfo, then write the virtqueue buffer content to host side as current logic - guest kernel will wait(similarly in block mode, because the user space address has been put into virtqueue) until QEMU backend has consumed buffer(all data/part data/nothing have been receive from host side) - if nothing has been sent out and file descriptor is in block mode, write request will wait through __wait_queue_head until host side is writable We obviously don't want to regress existing virtio behaviour and performance and welcome the communities expertise to point out anything we may have missed out before we get to far down implementing our initial proof-of-concept. Thanks, Matt Ma -- 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