Re: Proposal for virtio standardization.

[Cornelia Huck <cornelia.huck@de.ibm.com>]

On Thu, 27 Sep 2012 09:59:33 +0930
Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> 	I've had several requests for a more formal approach to the
> virtio draft spec, and (after some soul-searching) I'd like to try that.
> 
> 	The proposal is to use OASIS as the standards body, as it's
> fairly light-weight as these things go.  For me this means paperwork and
> setting up a Working Group and getting the right people involved as
> Voting members starting with the current contributors; for most of you
> it just means a new mailing list, though I'll be cross-posting any
> drafts and major changes here anyway.
> 
> 	I believe that a documented standard (aka virtio 1.0) will
> increase visibility and adoption in areas outside our normal linux/kvm
> universe.  There's been some of that already, but this is the clearest
> path to accelerate it.  Not the easiest path, but I believe that a solid
> I/O standard is a Good Thing for everyone.
> 
> 	Yet I also want to decouple new and experimental development
> from the standards effort; running code comes first.  New feature bits
> and new device numbers should be reservable without requiring a full
> spec change.
> 
> So the essence of my proposal is:
> 1) I start a Working Group within OASIS where we can aim for virtio spec
>    1.0.
> 
> 2) The current spec is textually reordered so the core is clearly
>    bus-independent, with PCI, mmio, etc appendices.
> 
> 3) Various clarifications, formalizations and cleanups to the spec text,
>    and possibly elimination of old deprecated features.
> 
> 4) The only significant change to the spec is that we use PCI
>    capabilities, so we can have infinite feature bits.
>    (see
> http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/virtualization/2011-December/019198.html)

"Infinite" only applies to virtio-pci, no?

> 
> 5) Changes to the ring layout and other such things are deferred to a
>    future virtio version; whether this is done within OASIS or
>    externally depends on how well this works for the 1.0 release.
> 
> Thoughts?
> Rusty.
> 

Sounds like a good idea. I'll be happy to review the spec with an eye
to virtio-ccw.

Cornelia