Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v11] kvm: notify host when the guest is panicked

[Marcelo Tosatti]

On Fri, Nov 09, 2012 at 03:17:39PM -0500, Sasha Levin wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 8:58 PM, Hu Tao <address@hidden> wrote:
> > But in the case of panic notification, more dependency means more
> > chances of failure of panic notification. Say, if we use a virtio device
> > to do panic notification, then we will fail if: virtio itself has
> > problems, virtio for some reason can't be deployed(neither built-in or
> > as a module), or guest doesn't support virtio, etc.
> 
> Add polling to your virtio device. If it didn't notify of a panic but
> taking more than 20 sec to answer your poll request you can assume
> it's dead.
> 
> Actually, just use virtio-serial and something in userspace on the guest.

They want the guest to stop, so a memory dump can be taken by management
interface.

Hu Tao, lets assume port I/O is the preferred method for communication.
Now, the following comments have still not been addressed:

1) Lifecycle of the stopped guest and interaction with other stopped
states in QEMU.

2) Format of the interface for other architectures (you can choose
a different KVM supported architecture and write an example).

3) Clear/documented management interface for the feature.