Fwd: Proposal for virtio standardization.

[Freddie Cash]

Thought this might be of interest to you all, as there are efforts underway
to develop virtio drivers for FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD.
 ---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Rusty Russell" <rusty at rustcorp.com.au>
Date: Sep 26, 2012 7:07 PM
Subject: Proposal for virtio standardization.
To: "Anthony Liguori" <aliguori at us.ibm.com>, "Adam Litke" <agl at us.ibm.com>,
"Amit Shah" <amit.shah at redhat.com>, "Avi Kivity" <avi at redhat.com>, "Avishay
Traeger" <AVISHAY at il.ibm.com>, "Jason Wang" <jasowang at redhat.com>, "Michael
S. Tsirkin" <mst at redhat.com>, "Ohad Ben-Cohen" <ohad at wizery.com>, "Paolo
Bonzini" <pbonzini at redhat.com>, "Pawel Moll" <pawel.moll at arm.com>, "Sasha
Levin" <levinsasha928 at gmail.com>, "Cornelia Huck" <cornelia.huck at de.ibm.com>
Cc: <virtualization at lists.linux-foundation.org>, "LKML" <
linux-kernel at vger.kernel.org>, <kvm at vger.kernel.org>, "qemu-devel" <
qemu-devel at nongnu.org>

Hi all,

        I've had several requests for a more formal approach to the
virtio draft spec, and (after some soul-searching) I'd like to try that.

        The proposal is to use OASIS as the standards body, as it's
fairly light-weight as these things go.  For me this means paperwork and
setting up a Working Group and getting the right people involved as
Voting members starting with the current contributors; for most of you
it just means a new mailing list, though I'll be cross-posting any
drafts and major changes here anyway.

        I believe that a documented standard (aka virtio 1.0) will
increase visibility and adoption in areas outside our normal linux/kvm
universe.  There's been some of that already, but this is the clearest
path to accelerate it.  Not the easiest path, but I believe that a solid
I/O standard is a Good Thing for everyone.

        Yet I also want to decouple new and experimental development
from the standards effort; running code comes first.  New feature bits
and new device numbers should be reservable without requiring a full
spec change.

So the essence of my proposal is:
1) I start a Working Group within OASIS where we can aim for virtio spec
   1.0.

2) The current spec is textually reordered so the core is clearly
   bus-independent, with PCI, mmio, etc appendices.

3) Various clarifications, formalizations and cleanups to the spec text,
   and possibly elimination of old deprecated features.

4) The only significant change to the spec is that we use PCI
   capabilities, so we can have infinite feature bits.
   (see
http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/virtualization/2011-December/019198.html
)

5) Changes to the ring layout and other such things are deferred to a
   future virtio version; whether this is done within OASIS or
   externally depends on how well this works for the 1.0 release.

Thoughts?
Rusty.
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