Re: Use of virtio device IDs

From: Anthony Liguori
Date: Wed Nov 07 2007 - 01:29:18 EST


Rusty Russell wrote:
On Wednesday 07 November 2007 16:40:13 Avi Kivity wrote:
Gregory Haskins wrote:
but FWIW: This is a major motivation for the reason that the
IOQ stuff I posted a while back used strings for device identification
instead of a fixed length, centrally managed namespace like PCI
vendor/dev-id. Then you can just name your device something reasonably
unique (e.g. "qumranet::veth", or "ibm-pvirt-clock").
I dislike strings. They make it look as if you have a nice extensible
interface, where in reality you have a poorly documented interface which
leads to poor interoperability.

Yes, you end up with exactly names like "qumranet::veth" and "ibm-pvirt-clock". I would recommend looking very hard at /proc, Open Firmware on a modern system, or the Xen store, to see what a lack of limitation can do to you :)

We will support non-pci for s390, but in order to support Windows and
older Linux PCI is necessary.

The aim is that PCI support is clean, but that we're not really tied to PCI. I think we're getting closer with the recent config changes.

Yes, my main desire was to ensure that we had a clean PCI ABI that would be natural to implement on a platform like Windows. I think with the recent config_ops refactoring, we can now do that.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

Cheers,
Rusty.

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