Re: [Qemu-devel] KVM call minutes for Oct 19

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 08:09:44AM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
> 
> On 10/21/2010 05:22 AM, Andrew Beekhof wrote:
> >
> >Hello from the Matahari tech-lead...
> >Is there any documentation on the capabilities provided guest agent 
> >Anthony is creating?  Perhaps we can combine efforts.
> 
> Mike should be posting today or tomorrow.
> 
> >Also happy to provide more information on Matahari if anyone is 
> >interested.
> 
> I'd really like to hear more about Matahari's long term vision.
> 
> For a QEMU guest agent, we need something that is very portable.  The 
> interfaces it provides need to be reasonably guest agnostic and we need 
> to support a wide range of guests including Windows, Linux, *BSD, etc.
> 
> From the little bit I've read about Matahari, it seems to be pretty 
> specific and pretty oriented towards Fedora-like distributions.  It 
> exposes interfaces for manipulation of RPM packages, relies on netcf, etc.

FYI netcf is not Fedora specific. There is a Win32 backend for it
too. It does need porting to other Linux distros, but that's simply
an internal implementation issue. The goal of netcf is to be the
libvirt of network config mgmt - a portable API for all OS network
config tasks. Further, Matahari itself is also being ported to Win32
and can be ported to other Linux distros too.

> There's nothing wrong with this if the goal of Matahari is to provide a 
> robust agent for Fedora-based Linux distributions but I don't think it 
> meets the requirements of a QEMU guest agent.
> 
> I don't think we can overly optimize for one Linux distribution either 
> so a mentality of letting other platforms contribute their own support 
> probably won't work.

That is not the goal of Matahari. It is intended to be generically
applicable to *all* guest OS. Obviously in areas where every distro
does different things, then it will need porting for each different
impl. You have to start somewhere and it started with Fedora. This
is all is true of any guest agent solution. 

Regards,
Daniel
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