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Re: [Qemu-devel] Virtualbox svga card in KVM


From: Andreas Färber
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] Virtualbox svga card in KVM
Date: Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:04:13 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130329 Thunderbird/17.0.5

Hi,

Am 08.04.2013 18:05, schrieb Sriram Murthy:
> The Virtualbox SVGA card was derived out of the KVM VGA card, so there are 
> quite a few similarities (I am deliberately being vague here as I am still in 
> the process of discovering the features of both these cards completely). 
> Having said that, the APIs and the data structures themselves have been 
> modified to add new features (like displaying a custom bmp as the VGA bootup 
> logo) and it has a custom vga bios as well.
> Also, it is better that it be its own separate device model, so that 
> maintenance of the vbox code becomes easier later. Further, I am thinking on 
> the lines of retaining the VIrtualbox SVGA card code as is, and write a small 
> KVM abstraction layer, so that it will be easy to port the bug fixes into the 
> vbox SVGA card later on. 
> Any comments/suggestions welcome here.

Personally, I think that the connection between VirtualBox and QEMU is
very unidirectional if there is any... So code-wise our focus should
rather be to avoid code copies/divergence within our tree and to share
code with existing in-tree devices, especially if you are not paid to
continuously take care of this device once accepted into QEMU - that's
how I interpret PMM's question below.

There is nothing generally wrong with using KVM for guest driver
development or to make existing stripped-down guest images work at all
by adding such a special device.

However, proposing to adopt a random vendor's paravirtual graphics card
just because it has a few more resolutions and drivers on a particular
platform does not strike me as a big advantage over SPICE, VMware VGA or
past virtio-vga/-fb standardization attempts.

Regards,
Andreas

> 
> -Sriram
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Peter Maydell <address@hidden>
> To: Sriram Murthy <address@hidden>
> Cc: Stefan Hajnoczi <address@hidden>; qemu list <address@hidden>; 
> "address@hidden" <address@hidden>
> Sent: Monday, April 8, 2013 8:11 AM
> Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] Virtualbox svga card in KVM
> 
> On 6 April 2013 00:52, Sriram Murthy <address@hidden> wrote:
>> (actually, the virtualbox SVGA card is based off of the KVM VGA card)
> 
> Is it possible to implement it as an extension to the VGA
> card device, or has it diverged incompatibly such that it
> has to be its own separate device model?
> 
> thanks
> -- PMM

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