[Lguest] "plug-ins" for devices

[Eric Van Hensbergen]

On 10/13/07, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
> Eric, when you say "lguest", you mean Documentation/lguest/lguest.c, right?
>
> If so, I could really use the additional capability. If you're going
> to clutter up lguest, 9p is about as good a thing as you could use. I
> could certainly make use of the cluttering :-)
>
> We're moving here to 9p connections for just about all our cluster
> infrastructure (here is Sandia Labs California). I routinely prototype
> all the new software with lguests on my laptop. So it's a great fit
> for us.
>

Well, of course I think the 9p stuff is definitely worth while ;) Its
just whether or not linking against libspfs is going to be a good idea
-- probably for most things gatewaying to a socket is sufficient
(perhaps preferred) -- its just for using 9p has a
"virtfs"/"hostfs"/paravirtualized-file-system it would be nice to keep
it as close to zero copy as possible.  I suppose another alternative
would be make to Documentation/lguest/lguest.c work like a library and
have other things link against it -- that way folks who wanted to tie
in tighter could keep the complexity elsewhere.

With KVM I'm less concerned as Qemu has a whole infrastructure for
selectively including/excluding random bits.  Of course I've always
liked that lguest didn't need ./configure.  Perhaps I'm stressing too
much over this, perhaps an alternate make target would be sufficient
as 9p support certainly doesn't need to be the common case.

             -eric