Re: [Xen-devel] DomU-Dom0 communication question

["Ryan Riley" <rileyrd@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 5/2/07, mk.xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mk.xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi all,

I need to create a custom communication channel between DomU and Dom0 in order to send arbitrary messages/buffers between applications in Dom0 and DomU.

That sounds strangely familiar to what I had to do last month.  Basically building a mechanism to transport arbitrary strings out of the guest and into Dom0.

Basically, I am thinking about making a char control driver on both sides that would transport those messages to subscribers on either end using defined IOCL calls.

Seems very doable.

I am looking at backend/frontend drivers and I don't think it would work for what I want to do as fron/back ends don't have any devices associated with it.

Hmm, it sounds like you may be a bit confused regarding how the split drivers work.  For any useful frontend/backend device each side ends up being two drivers in one.  One is the frontend/backend driver, the other is the device that the OS sees.  For example, the networking frontend has all of the code the being a Xen frontend driver (event channels, probe handling, etc) and is also a network device that the guest interacts with.  In a sense it registers itself as two drivers.

You could definitely write a split driver that has character devices on both ends that share data.  My backend driver for the project I mentioned above is exactly that.  (Frontend kernel puts data onto a ring buffer, backend kernel reads it off and makes it available as a character device.)

Would it be better to utilize event channel directly or write frontend/backend drivers and control drivers on both ends? Or maybe there is another mechanism that already exists in xen environment and I am just trying to do things the hard way? Any advise is greatly appreciated.

This probably sounds bad, but if you can get away with it I would do everything is user space and send your arbitrary data/buffers over the network link.  Trust me when I say that you'll lose less hair that way.

If you decide to go the split driver route, I can supply you with my code.  It isn't pretty, but it may help you out.  Let me know if you're interested.

Thanks
Ryan
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