Author: mstsirkin
Date: 2015-05-18 20:48:58 +0000 (Mon, 18 May 2015)
New Revision: 526
Web View: https://tools.oasis-open.org/version-control/browse/wsvn/virtio/?rev=526&sc=1
Modified:
branches/v1.0/conformance.tex
branches/v1.0/content.tex
Log:
balloon: transitional device support
Virtio 1.0 cs02 doesn't include a modern balloon device. At some
point we'll likely define an incompatible interface with a
different ID and different semantics. But for now, it's not a
big effort to support a transitional balloon device: this has the
advantage of supporting existing drivers, transparently, as well
as transports that don't allow mixing virtio 0 and virtio 1
devices. And balloon is an easy device to test, so it's also
useful for people to test virtio core handling of transitional
devices.
Three issues with legacy hypervisors have been identified:
1. Actual value is actually used, and is necessary for management
to work. Luckily 4 byte config space writes are now atomic.
When using old guests, hypervisors can detect access to the last byte.
When using old hypervisors, drivers can use atomic 4-byte accesses.
2. Hypervisors actually didn't ignore the stats from the first
buffer supplied. This means the values there would be
incorrect until hypervisor resends the request.
Add a note suggesting hypervisors ignore the 1st buffer.
3. QEMU simply over-writes stats from each buffer it gets.
Thus if driver supplies a different subset of stats
on each request, stale values will be there.
Require drivers to supply the same subset on each
request. This also gives us a simple way to figure out
which stats are supported.
VIRTIO-143
Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <>
