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Re: [Xen-devel] [RFC] Xen Virtual Framebuffer



Now that's 3.0.0's out, I thought it would be a good time to bring up the topic of framebuffer virtualization.

I threw together a proof-of-concept over the weekend of a simple virtual framebuffer/keyboard/mouse. The basic design is have a vmalloc()'d buffer in the guest exposed as /dev/fb0 and mmap()'d in dom0. There's also a simple message system for keyboard/mouse events.

The first frontend is a GTK widget with python bindings (so it can easily be embedded in a larger management app) and a small python app. Right now, the VT system seems to work fine and X starts quite happily (using the fbdev driver). Clicking in the app captures the mouse/keyboard and ctrl+alt will release the capture.

There's a readme and an hg bundle in the tarball below that explains how to set things up.

Some interesting topics in this area are acceleration, whether we should implement our own X driver (or just enhance the fbdev driver since it uses no acceleration right now), and how to properly expose it over something like VNC.

As always, feedback is greatly appreciated.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/aliguori/xen-vfb-20051205.tar.gz

Regards,

Anthony Liguori


Anthony,

Looking at Xen from the perspective of managing a farm of machines, what I want is a single method for remotely accessing the console/graphics for a guest domain, regardless of whether the domain is PV/VT. (A method of connect a VNC client to dom0 port 5900 + domid would be just fine. [From the code, this seems to be way qemu does it for VNC.]) The current model of "xm console" and Xvnc for PV domains is annoying. Unless, I am misunderstanding what you are doing, once you add the VNC support, your work provides what I want.

So, what are the prospects of getting it finished and in, in the near future? Is there any chance of getting it into the 3.0.x code base?

Thanks,

John Byrne







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