Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] xen/xenbus: Add quirk to deal withmisconfigured backends.

[Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 03:16:43PM +0000, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Mar 2012, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 10:52:26AM +0000, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2012-03-22 at 10:44 +0000, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> > > > On Thu, 22 Mar 2012, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
> > > > > A rather annoying and common case is when booting a PVonHVM guest
> > > > > and exposing the PV KBD and PV VFB - as both of those do not
> > > > > make any sense. The HVM guest is using the VGA driver and the emulated
> > > > > keyboard for this. So we provide a very basic quirk framework
> > > > > (can be expanded in the future) to not wait for 6 minutes for those devices
> > > > > to initialize - they never wont.
> > > > > 
> > > > > To trigger this, put this in your guest config:
> > > > > 
> > > > > vfb = [ 'vnc=1, vnclisten=0.0.0.0 ,vncunused=1']
> > > > > 
> > > > > instead of this:
> > > > > vnc=1
> > > > > vnclisten="0.0.0.0"
> > > > 
> > > > While I do understand the issue you are trying to solve, it actually
> > > > makes sense to have PV KBD (and PV VFB maybe in the future) in a PVonHVM
> > > > guest. In particular PV KVB is already enabled in upstream QEMU for
> > > > PVonHVM guests because it allows users to have a keyboard and mouse
> > 
> > How about looking for a particular Xen version? The patch
> > could check for anything less than 4.2 (does 4.2 use that version of
> > QEMU that has this implemented?). I can't find any way to get the QEMU
> > version from within the guest - DMI reports:
> > 
> > DMI: Xen HVM domU, BIOS 4.1-120322 03/22/2012
> 
> I am not a great fun of enabling/disabling features depending on the Xen
> version. What happens for example if a Linux distro decided to patch
> QEMU 4.1 to enable PV KBD for PVonHVM guests?
> I realize that it is unlikely but it is possible.
> Maybe we can reduce the timeout for non essential devices (everything
> expect disk, network and console) like Ian suggested?

Please take a look: