Re: A set of "standard" virtual devices?

[H. Peter Anvin]

Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> Andi Kleen wrote:
> > The implementation wouldn't need to use PCI at all. There wouldn't 
> > even need to be PCI like registers internally. Just a pci device
> > with an ID somewhere in sysfs. PCI with unique IDs
> > is just a convenient and well established key into the driver module
> > collection. Once you have the right driver it can do what it wants.
>
> But I understood hpa's suggestion to mean that there would be a standard
> PCI interface for a hardware RNG, and a single linux driver for that
> device, which all hypervisors would be expected to implement.  But
> that's only reasonable if the virtualization environment has some notion
> of PCI to expose to the Linux guest.

That is, of course, true, although "some notion of" is very broad, and 
one could also use this for detection and some hypervisor-specific 
communication for the actual I/O.

However, one probably wants to think about what the heck one actually 
means with "virtualization" in the absence of a lot of this stuff.  PCI 
is probably the closest thing we have to a lowest common denominator for 
device detection.

	-hpa
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