Ian Molton wrote: > I've merely implemented one solution in qemu that other hypervisors > *AND* the kernel already support, and that users want.
I think that's a good reason to include virtio-rng support in some form. I suspect Paul's objection may have been due to an impression that virtio-rng was a new thing developed by you, or an obscure thing that nobody uses at the moment. But: Does it have many users at present? > virtio-serial > ------------- > * Impossible to interface with the kernels hwrng core and thus > useless for debugging it and related tools on the guest. That was my question earlier: Impossible? Seems like it should be easy. The kernel can bind its console to virtio-serial, so it should be able to bind its hwrng to another one > > If it's dumb enough to just trickle the entropy through, that would > > seem a very good match to virtio-serial - apart from the guests which > > already expect virtio-rng support. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > > Isn't that latter feature a good enough reason on its own? qemu supports > a LOT of obscure hardware already - so "its weird" is also NOT a good > reason against it. And its not even weird or unusual in this instance. I agree, if there are more than a few obscure guests depending on it already. However if it's only a handful and they can easily be upgraded to a newer kernel using something else, maybe it's not worth it. Your patches don't just add another device emulation. They're a bit more invasive than that. > If qemu is only to support one way of doing any given operation then we > should get rid of a LOT of other drivers - like most of the video > drivers for example, and IDE/SCSI/SATA - well, all guests should just > use virtio-block, right? Sometimes, when I notice the increasing number of bug reports that older guest OSes no longer work, I get the impression that's what KVM developers would prefer :-) For a certain class of users that's right. Some users (generally the "virtualization farm" variety) only need to run recent guests which support virtio. -- Jamie
