Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 00/17] virtual-bus

From: Gregory Haskins <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:32:39 -0400

Chris Wright wrote:
> * Gregory Haskins ([email-masked]) wrote:
>   
>> Let me ask you this:  If you had a clean slate and were designing a
>> hypervisor and a guest OS from scratch:  What would you make the bus
>> look like?
>>     
>
> Well, virtio did have a relatively clean slate. And PCI (as _one_
> transport option) is what it looks like.  It's not the only transport
> (as Avi already mentioned it works for s390, for example).
>   

Got it.  Thanks.

> BTW, from my brief look at vbus, it seems pretty similar to xenbus.
>   

If you are referring to the guest side interface, it was actually
inspired by lguest's bus (I forget what Rusty called it now, though).  
I think I actually declared that in the original patch series I put out
1.5 years ago, but I might have inadvertently omitted that on this
go-round.

I think XenBus is more of an event channel infrastructure, isn't it? 
But in any case, I think the nature of getting PV drivers into a guest
is relatively similar, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were
parallels in quite a few of the implementations.  In fact, I chose a
generic name like "vbus" in hopes that it could be used across different
hypervisors. :)

-Greg