As I said to Gleb in the previous email - sorry for the delay in replying to your thoughtful comments! On 9/10/2013 8:47 AM, Paolo Bonzini wrote: > Il 28/08/2013 22:58, Chris Metcalf ha scritto: >> This change enables support for a virtio-based console, >> network support, and block driver support. >> >> We remove some debug code in relocate_kernel_64.S that made raw >> calls to the hv_console_putc Tilera hypervisor API, since everything >> now should funnel through the early_hv_write() API. >> >> Signed-off-by: Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf@xxxxxxxxxx> > Why couldn't this use the "regular" virtio-mmio interface? We probably should! We were working with a CentOS 6 style distribution, which has an older version of qemu; we upgraded slightly to 0.13 in the thought that minimizing version skew would help distribution compatibility. That version doesn't have the virtio-mmio stuff. But you're right, we probably should return the virtio-mmio stuff to the community instead, even if we're going to keep something like this patch in our local copy of KVM. >> static void early_hv_write(struct console *con, const char *s, unsigned n) >> { >> +#ifdef CONFIG_KVM_GUEST >> + char buf[512]; >> + >> + if (n > sizeof(buf) - 1) >> + n = sizeof(buf) - 1; >> + memcpy(buf, s, n); >> + buf[n] = '\0'; >> + >> + hcall_virtio(KVM_VIRTIO_NOTIFY, __pa(buf)); > How can userspace know the difference between KVM_VIRTIO_NOTIFY with a > string buffer, and KVM_VIRTIO_NOTIFY with a config space pointer? > > In fact, this looks like a completely separate hypercall, why not keep > hv_console_putc? Good point. Right now in qemu the virtio hypercall with a KVM_VIRTIO_NOTIFY reason either does a virtio_queue_notify(), if the address is not in RAM, or a print, if it is. It does seem we could just have separate calls; the reason we grouped it in with the KVM_VIRTIO stuff instead of implementing it with the hv_console_write() API is just that it uses the virtio_console API to do the work. But we probably could do it the other way too, and that might arguably make more sense. We'll think about it. Thanks! -- Chris Metcalf, Tilera Corp. http://www.tilera.com -- 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