Re: [Qemu-devel] converging around a single guest agent

[Anthony Liguori]

On 11/16/2011 06:07 AM, Alon Levy wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 08:53:45AM +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > On 11/15/2011 11:39 PM, Ayal Baron wrote:
> > >
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > > > If you want to talk about convergence, the discussion should start
> > > > around
> > > > collecting requirements.  We can then figure out if the two sets of
> > > > requirements
> > > > are strictly overlapping or if there are any requirements that are
> > > > fundamentally
> > > > in opposition.
> > >
> > > Agreed.
> > >
> > > So vdsm guest agent goal is to ease administration of VMs.  This is not saying 
> > > much as it is quite broad so I will list what is provided today and some things 
> > > we need to add:
> > >
> > > Assistance in VM life-cycle:
> > > "desktopShutdown" - Shuts the VM down gracefully from within the guest.
> > > "quiesce" - does not exist today.  This is definitely a requirement for us.
> > >
> > > SSO support for spice sessions (automatically login into guest OS using 
> > > provided credentials):
> > > "desktopLock" - lock current session, used when spice session gets disconnected 
> > > / before giving a new user access to spice session
> > > "desktopLogin"
> > > "desktopLogoff"
> > > In addition, guest reports relevant info (currently active user, session state)
> > >
> > > Monitoring and inventory:
> > > currently agent sends info periodically, which includes a lot of info which 
> > > should probably be broken down and served upon request. Info includes -
> > > - memory usage
> > > - NICs info (name, hw, inet, inet6)
> > > - appslist (list of installed apps / rpms)
> > > - OS type
> > > - guest hostname
> > > - internal file systems info (path, fs type, total space, used space)
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > If we're gathering requirements and trying to come up with one agent to rule 
> > them all, don't forget
> > about VDI and the Spice agent. Currently the spice agent handles the following:
> >
> > 1) Paravirtual mouse (needed to get mouse coordinates right with multi monitor 
> > setups)

I thought there was wide agreement that pv mouse should be extracted from the 
guest agent into its own driver.

> > 2) Send client monitor configuration, so that the guest os can adjust its 
> > resolution
> >     (and number and place of monitors) to match the client

I also wonder if this should be part of QXL?

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> > 3) Copy and paste in a platform neutral manner, if anyone wishes to add this to 
> > another agent
> >     please, please contact us (me) first. This is easy to get wrong (we went 
> > through 2 revisions
> >     of the protocol for this).
> > 4) Allow the client to request the guest to tone down the bling (for low spec 
> > clients)
> As long as we are collecting requirements, even if as Ayal said merging
> spice requirements is not the OP's intent:
>
>   5) Window management - Agent can set location of windows, report
>   existing running applications and locations, get notified when a new
>   window is created. For exposing individual applications, this is a
>   future requirement.
>
> > Notes:
> > 1) All of these are client<->  guest communication, rather then the host<->  
> > guest communication
> > which the other agents seem to focus on.
> >
> > 2) Getting copy paste right requires a system level guest agent process as well 
> > as a per user
> > session agent process.
>
> > Regards,
> >
> > Hans