RE: [PATCH 00/13] drivers: hv: kvp

-----Original Message-----
From: Jesper Juhl [mailto:jj@chaosbits.net]
Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2012 7:31 PM
To: KY Srinivasan
Cc: gregkh@linuxfoundation.org; linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org;
devel@linuxdriverproject.org; virtualization@lists.osdl.org; ohering@suse.com;
apw@canonical.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/13] drivers: hv: kvp

On Thu, 21 Jun 2012, K. Y. Srinivasan wrote:

quoted

This patchset expands the KVP (Key Value Pair) functionality to
implement the mechanism to get/set IP addresses in the guest. This
functionality is used in Windows Server 2012 to implement VM
replication functionality. The way IP configuration information
is managed is distro specific. The current implementation supports
RedHat way of doing things. We will expand support to other distros
incrementally.

So there is going to be a continuous flow of patches to add support for
new distros (Arch Linux, Slackware, Linux Mint, SuSE, Debian, etc etc) and
if different versions of a distro handles things differently then you are
also going to deal with that? Might be fine, but it just sounds a bit
scary to me to try to support m different distros, each in n different
versions from the kernel... Couldn't this somehow be done once and for all
in a distro neutral way?
Just asking :-)

Most of the code is not going to be distro specific. Obviously the kernel component
Is not distro specific. To the extent that the way the IP configuration state is managed
differently across distros, the user level component of the KVP code needs to 
accommodate that. Even here most of the code is distro independent. 

Regards,

K. Y