Re: [Xen-devel] [Xen Hackathon] new PV drivers

[Stefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 9 Jun 2014, Ian Campbell wrote:
> On Fri, 2014-06-06 at 14:56 +0100, Anil Madhavapeddy wrote:
> > On 3 Jun 2014, at 12:47, Stefano Stabellini 
> > <stefano.stabellini@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 
> > > Present (by memory):
> > > - Julien Grall,
> > > - Stefano Stabellini,
> > > - Ian Campbell,
> > > - Roger Pau Monne,
> > > - Dario Faggioli,
> > > - Andrii Tseglytskyi,
> > > - David Vrabel,
> > > - Konrad Wilk.
> > > 
> > > * What new PV devices do we need? What has been done already?
> > 
> > I missed this session, but was wondering about an entropy driver.
> > We're integrating an OCaml SSL/TLS into MirageOS, and it's not clear
> > how PV guests should go about getting a strong source of entropy from
> > the outside world in a reasonably portable way.
> > 
> > VirtIO has a RNG [1] -- has anyone got any interest in a PV protocol
> > for Xen that does the same?
> 
> IMHO support for these sorts of things is actually one of the few good
> reasons to be considering support for basic virtio on Xen.
> 
> Alternatively AIUI a bunch of these sort of virtio devices are just
> protocols built on top of virtio_serial, so we could perhaps be thinking
> of repurposing them over Xen's serial PV device. Dave S was
> investigating the difference between libvirt "serial" and "channel"
> recently and AIUI the difference was that a channel could be named in
> order to support bindings to these higher level things (i.e. appearing
> to the guest as /dev/rng instead of /dev/hvcN).

However writing a good PV-RNG should be far easier than making virtio
work properly with Xen PV guests.

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