[Kimchi-devel] Host Device Passthrough UI Task Discussion

Hi, As in Kimchi 1.3 TODO list (https://github.com/kimchi-project/kimchi/wiki/Todo-1.3), there is a task of passthrough support. It is to enable Kimchi to assign hos devices directly to a VM, thus greately improve VM performance. Currently we support assigning PCI device, USB device and SCSI LUN. For example, we can assign an NIC to VM to improve guest network throughput, or passthrough a USB camera to enable the guest OS to record video. The back-end patch also handles PCI device grouping (attach and detach all devices in the same iommu group together) and provides some other useful features. Since the due day is near, I think we can come up with an easy and simple UI for 1.3, and mark this feature as experimental. Then we improve it in future releases. So in this release we may only expose PCI devices to user and don't mention the iommu grouping logic. For this version I think we may provide the following operations to the user. In the VM edit window, initially, the user sees a list of PCI devices already assigned to the VM. This maps to GET vms/VM_NAME/hostdevs. In edit mode, the user can detach device. This maps to DELETE vms/VM_NAME/hostdevs/DEVICE_NAME. The user can also select device to attach to VM from a list. The listing of eligible devices is mapped to GET host/devices?_passthrough=true&_cap=pci. To attach a device, just POST a dict containing only the device name to vms/VM_NAME/hostdevs. I think these operations forms a basic interaction to enable user to consume this feature. It may be feasible to finish them before the due day. -- Zhou Zheng Sheng / 周征晟 E-mail: zhshzhou(a)linux.vnet.ibm.com Telephone: 86-10-82454397