On 15/01/16 17:44, Sinan Kaya wrote:

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You may want to drop the "hypervisor" designation, BTW, because this has
no real connection to virtualisation.

Would you use host/guest relationship?

Not even that. This is a host/user relationship, as VFIO is in no way
virtualisation specific. It just gives you a way to make a device
accessible to userspace. KVM is just a specialised instance of a more
generic problem.

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Once the guest machine is shutdown, VFIO driver still owns the channel device. It can
assign the device to another guest machine.

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- Does the HYP side requires any context switch (and how is that done)?

No communication is needed.

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- What makes it safe?

No communication is needed.

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Without any of this information (and pointer to the code to back it up),
I'm very reluctant to take any of this.

Please let me know what exactly is not clear. 

You don't write a virtualization driver for 8139too driver. The driver works whether it is running in the 
guest machine or the hypervisor. 

Exactly. No hypervisor code needed whatsoever. So please get rid of this
hypervisor nonsense! ;-)

I need the management driver for administrative purposes and common initialization. 
I like the split SW design as it follows the HW design too.

I have no problem with the split design (whatever floats your boat),
more with the terminology which I find very confusing. It would be a lot
better if you stuck with management (host) and client (user), or some
other general terminology.

Thanks,

	M.
-- 
Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny...