Re: [Xen-devel] xl PVUSB pass-through

[George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 3:59 PM, Stefan <sstanisi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Good Morning:
>
> Our Xen clusters depend heavily on that feature. The lack of it prevents us
> from transitioning to the new toolstack. Currently we use PVUSB to attach a
> USB Smartcard reader through our dom0 (SLES 11 SP1) running on an HP Blade
> Server with the Token mounted on an internal USB Port to our domU CA server
> (SLES 11)
>
> I'd like to know how likely it is to make it to the next release. Does
> anyone have a solution that doesn't require PVUSB? I'd like to give a hand
> if that can help making PVUSB part of Xen 4.3.

For PVUSB to work for any particular VM, you need two things:
* PVUSB kernel support in the guest VM and dom0 (or driver domain)
* The toolstack has to know how to connect the two.

"Classic xen" kernels like those supported by SuSE have PVUSB support,
and xend has support for setting up the connection.

So regarding PVUSB there are two tasks:

1. Teach xl/libxl how to set up the connection
2. Port PVUSB to pvops kernels.

It sounds like the main thing you need is to have the xl/libxl
support.  This should just be a matter of looking at what xend does in
setting up the PVUSB connection, and duplicating that in xl.  If you'd
be willing to give that a try, that would be great -- we'd love to
help out.

If you've never submitted patches before,
http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Submitting_Xen_Patches has some helpful
advice.

If for some reason PVUSB doesn't make it into 4.3, another option you
can explore is running your VMs in PVHVM mode; xl will definitely
support USB pass-through for HVM domains in 4.3.

 -George

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xen.org/xen-devel