Re: [Xen-devel] Prototype to use QEMU for PV guest framebuffer

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 01:00:50AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 29, 2007 at 11:03:09PM +0100, Ian Pratt wrote:
> > 
> > It'll certainly be good to see the back of libvncserver.
> > 
> > Could you investigate whether this patch applies to qemu-dm easily
> > enough?
> 
> The answer was yes & no :-)  Although we've got a separate target for
> QEMU, there's still a bunch of stuff in the main vl.c that is specific
> to HVM guests - the memory map initialization basically.
> 
> The way I've approached this problem is to define two QEMU machines
> 
>   $ ./ioemu/i386-dm/qemu-dm -M ?
>   Supported machines are:
>   xenfv      Xen Fullyvirtualized PC (default)
>   xenpv      Xen Paravirtualized PC
> 
> The little bit of HVM specific stuff from vl.c I've moved into the machine 
> specific init function in  hw/xenfv.c
> 
> As with my first prototype the hw/xenpv.c file provides a machine for Xen
> paravirt guests which merely talks the PVFB protocol. The only change from
> my previous patch is that it now does pixel swizzling if the guest display
> depth is not the same as the QEMU display depth.
> 
> So, in summary this does look like it'll work fairly well for PVFB.  The
> patch attached is my latest work-in-progress
> 
>  b/tools/ioemu/hw/xenfb.c             |  822 
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  b/tools/ioemu/hw/xenfb.h             |   35 +
>  b/tools/ioemu/hw/xenfv.c             |  258 ++++++++++
>  b/tools/ioemu/hw/xenpv.c             |  157 ++++++
>  tools/ioemu/Makefile.target          |    6 
>  tools/ioemu/target-i386-dm/helper2.c |    3 
>  tools/ioemu/vl.c                     |  242 ----------
>  tools/ioemu/vl.h                     |    4 
>  12 files changed, 1287 insertions(+), 240 deletions(-)
> 
> 
> 
> Taking this idea of using QEMU for PV services a little further it occured
> to me that if we could figure out a way to get the bootloaders to be run
> from QEMU instead of XenD then we would be able to interact with pygrub
> remotely over the graphical VNC console - currently you can only use it 
> over the text serial console on the local host. It might also require that
> we have QEMU handling the guest console directly instead of xenconsoled.
> ie so that QEMU could make the bootloader (pygrub) available on both VNC & 
> a PTY at the same time. This would also mean the serial console could take 
> advantage of QEMU's support for accessing it via UDP, or TCP, or TCP+telnet, 
> as well as local PTYs.

Here's a further iteration of the patch which demonstrates how QEMU can
provide the guest console too. I launch it with this:

  qemu-dm -M xenpv -d 6 -vnc :0 -serial pty

A couple of open issues

 - QEMU doesn't let us poll() on write event for its character device sinks,
   so in theory we could be loosing data if the pty were to give EAGAIN.
   I think it should be possible to address this fairly easily.

 - The xenconsoled has persistent logging of guest & HV. For the latter we
   could just strip xenconsoled to merely provide HV logging, or even move
   that into XenD since its such a tiny amount of code. For guest logging
   QEMU can use '-serial file:/path' but then you can't use it via the pty
   Probably could extend QEMU command line syntax '-serial pty;file:/path'
   to open and PTY & log at the same time.

Those minor details aside though, this seems to work quite well - the code
is only 400 lines, compared to about 1200 lines in xenconsoled.

Regards,
Dan.
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Attachment: xen-qemu-machine-2.patch
Description: Text document

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