[Qemu-devel] Guest Agent Summaries

[Michael Roth]

On 12/05/2011 01:21 PM, Chris Wright wrote:
> * Chris Wright (chrisw at redhat.com) wrote:
>> * Anthony Liguori (aliguori at us.ibm.com) wrote:
>>> 1. A short introduction to each of the guest agents, what guests they
>>> support, and what verbs they support.
>>
>> I think we did this once before w/ Matahari.  Can we please capture
>> these things in email before the call, so people actually have time
>> to ponder the details.
>>
>>> 2. A short description of key requirements from each party (oVirt, libvirt,
>>> QEMU) for a guest agent
>>
>> Same here...call this the abstract/intro of the above detailed list of
>> verbs and guest support, and send it by Friday this week.
>>
>> I know there's plenty of details buried in the current thread and old
>> discussions of Matahari.  But that's just it...buried...
>
> It's past Friday.  Barak's links are all we have so far...

Sorry this slipped by me. However, Barak's link to the guest agent 
proposals:

http://www.ovirt.org/wiki/Guest_agent_proposals

is a summary of the recent discussion on guest agents for oVirt from the 
following thread:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.ovirt.vdsm.devel/93/focus=93

Requirements were posted there for oVirt (ovirt-guest-agent), QEMU 
(qemu-ga), and Spice (vdagent) and pulled into wiki, so as far as 
requirements go that is probably the best summary available at the 
moment. There is also summary of the current proposals for how to go 
about leveraging ovirt-guest-agent or qemu-ga for oVirt/QEMU requirements.

Matahari was mentioned only in brief since it didn't come up much in 
that particular discussion, but feel free to add as a response to this 
email and I can add it to the wiki so we can start getting all this 
stuff in one place.

But for brevity, a (slightly) higher-level summary would be:

A. oVirt (currently using ovirt-guest-agent)

    1) supported functionality:
       - protocol: JSON RPC over virtio-serial
       - verbs: lock screen, login/logoff (automatic/SSO on RHEL/Windows 
with plugins installed), shutdown
       - guest info: machine name, OS, packages, avail. RAM, logged in 
users, disk usage, networks interfaces
       - notifications: guest/agent up, heartbeat, user info, session 
lock/unlock/logoff/logon, agent uninstalled

    2) key requirements:
       - first-class support for oVirt guest extensions
       - VM life-cycle assistance
       - single sign-on support for spice desktop sessions
       - monitoring and inventory
       - make VDSM management more robust/guest-aware

    3) additional info:
       - http://www.ovirt.org/w/images/2/20/Ovirt-guest-agent.pdf
       - http://www.ovirt.org/wiki/Ovirt_guest_agent


B. QEMU (currently using qemu-ga):

    1) supported functionality:
       - protocol: JSON RPC (QMP) over virtio-serial/"isa"-serial
       - verbs: ping, agent info, shutdown, file 
open/read/write/seek/flush/close, filesystem freeze, command exec 
(experimental, RFC this week)
       - guest info: arbitrary (via file read/command exec)
       - notifications: on hold till QMP/QAPI integration completed
    2) key requirements:
       - first-class support for QEMU guest extensions (usable by device 
model, integrated into QMP, same repo (for lock-step versioning and 
hypervisor deployability via ISO or other host-initiated mechanism 
rather than guest distro support)
       - implement low-level primitives that QEMU can use, higher-level 
functionality built on top of the QMP interfaces it exposes.
    3) additional info:
       - http://wiki.qemu.org/Features/QAPI/GuestAgent (might be down 
atm =/)


C. Spice (vdagent):

    1) supported functionality:
       - protocol: binary RPC over virtio-serial
       - verbs: set mouse state, monitor/display config, copy/paste
    2) key requirements:
       - first-class support for Spice extensions (managing QXL 
devices/displays remotely, desktop integration (copy/paste, etc)
       - session-level guest agent
    3) additional info:
       - http://spice-space.org/page/Whiteboard/AgentProtocol

Please feel free to add to this, and I'll roll it back into the wiki.

>
> thanks,
> -chris
>