Use of virtio device IDs

From: Anthony Liguori
Date: Tue Nov 06 2007 - 12:16:20 EST


Hi Rusty,

I've written a PCI virtio transport and noticed something strange. All current in-tree virtio devices register ID tables that match a specific device ID, but any vendor ID.

This is incompatible with using PCI vendor/device IDs for virtio vendor/device IDs since vendors control what device IDs mean. A simple solution would be to assign a fixed vendor ID to all current virtio devices. This doesn't solve the problem completely though since you would create a conflict between the PCI vendor ID space and the virtio vendor ID space.

The only solutions seem to be virtualizing the virtio vendor/device IDs (which is what I'm currently doing) or to mandate that the virtio vendor ID be within the PCI vendor ID space. It's probably not necessary to make the same requirement for device IDs though.

What are your thoughts?

Regards,

Anthony Liguori
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