On 12/23/09 1:15 AM, Kyle Moffett wrote: > On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 12:36, Gregory Haskins > <gregory.haskins@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> On 12/22/09 2:57 AM, Ingo Molnar wrote: >>> * Gregory Haskins <gregory.haskins@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>>> Actually, these patches have nothing to do with the KVM folks. [...] >>> >>> That claim is curious to me - the AlacrityVM host >> >> It's quite simple, really. These drivers support accessing vbus, and >> vbus is hypervisor agnostic. In fact, vbus isn't necessarily even >> hypervisor related. It may be used anywhere where a Linux kernel is the >> "io backend", which includes hypervisors like AlacrityVM, but also >> userspace apps, and interconnected physical systems as well. >> >> The vbus-core on the backend, and the drivers on the frontend operate >> completely independent of the underlying hypervisor. A glue piece >> called a "connector" ties them together, and any "hypervisor" specific >> details are encapsulated in the connector module. In this case, the >> connector surfaces to the guest side as a pci-bridge, so even that is >> not hypervisor specific per se. It will work with any pci-bridge that >> exposes a compatible ABI, which conceivably could be actual hardware. > > This is actually something that is of particular interest to me. I > have a few prototype boards right now with programmable PCI-E > host/device links on them; one of my long-term plans is to finagle > vbus into providing multiple "virtual" devices across that single > PCI-E interface. > > Specifically, I want to be able to provide virtual NIC(s), serial > ports and serial consoles, virtual block storage, and possibly other > kinds of interfaces. My big problem with existing virtio right now > (although I would be happy to be proven wrong) is that it seems to > need some sort of out-of-band communication channel for setting up > devices, not to mention it seems to need one PCI device per virtual > device. > > So I would love to be able to port something like vbus to my nify PCI > hardware and write some backend drivers... then my PCI-E connected > systems would dynamically provide a list of highly-efficient "virtual" > devices to each other, with only one 4-lane PCI-E bus. Hi Kyle, We indeed have others that are doing something similar. I have CC'd Ira who may be able to provide you more details. I would also point you at the canonical example for what you would need to write to tie your systems together. Its the "null connector", which you can find here: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/ghaskins/alacrityvm/linux-2.6.git;a=blob;f=kernel/vbus/connectors/null.c;h=b6d16cb68b7e49e07528278bc9f5b73e1dac0c2f;hb=HEAD Do not hesitate to ask any questions, though you may want to take the conversation to the alacrityvm-devel list as to not annoy the current CC list any further than I already have ;) Kind Regards, -Greg
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