Hi all, I've had several requests for a more formal approach to the virtio draft spec, and (after some soul-searching) I'd like to try that. The proposal is to use OASIS as the standards body, as it's fairly light-weight as these things go. For me this means paperwork and setting up a Working Group and getting the right people involved as Voting members starting with the current contributors; for most of you it just means a new mailing list, though I'll be cross-posting any drafts and major changes here anyway. I believe that a documented standard (aka virtio 1.0) will increase visibility and adoption in areas outside our normal linux/kvm universe. There's been some of that already, but this is the clearest path to accelerate it. Not the easiest path, but I believe that a solid I/O standard is a Good Thing for everyone. Yet I also want to decouple new and experimental development from the standards effort; running code comes first. New feature bits and new device numbers should be reservable without requiring a full spec change. So the essence of my proposal is: 1) I start a Working Group within OASIS where we can aim for virtio spec 1.0. 2) The current spec is textually reordered so the core is clearly bus-independent, with PCI, mmio, etc appendices. 3) Various clarifications, formalizations and cleanups to the spec text, and possibly elimination of old deprecated features. 4) The only significant change to the spec is that we use PCI capabilities, so we can have infinite feature bits. (see http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/virtualization/2011-December/019198.html) 5) Changes to the ring layout and other such things are deferred to a future virtio version; whether this is done within OASIS or externally depends on how well this works for the 1.0 release. Thoughts? Rusty. -- 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
