[Qemu-devel] converging around a single guest agent

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 11/15/2011 11:39 PM, Ayal Baron wrote:
>

<snip>

>> If you want to talk about convergence, the discussion should start
>> around
>> collecting requirements.  We can then figure out if the two sets of
>> requirements
>> are strictly overlapping or if there are any requirements that are
>> fundamentally
>> in opposition.
>
> Agreed.
>
> So vdsm guest agent goal is to ease administration of VMs.  This is not saying much as it is quite broad so I will list what is provided today and some things we need to add:
>
> Assistance in VM life-cycle:
> "desktopShutdown" - Shuts the VM down gracefully from within the guest.
> "quiesce" - does not exist today.  This is definitely a requirement for us.
>
> SSO support for spice sessions (automatically login into guest OS using provided credentials):
> "desktopLock" - lock current session, used when spice session gets disconnected / before giving a new user access to spice session
> "desktopLogin"
> "desktopLogoff"
> In addition, guest reports relevant info (currently active user, session state)
>
> Monitoring and inventory:
> currently agent sends info periodically, which includes a lot of info which should probably be broken down and served upon request. Info includes -
> - memory usage
> - NICs info (name, hw, inet, inet6)
> - appslist (list of installed apps / rpms)
> - OS type
> - guest hostname
> - internal file systems info (path, fs type, total space, used space)
>

<snip>

If we're gathering requirements and trying to come up with one agent to rule them all, don't forget
about VDI and the Spice agent. Currently the spice agent handles the following:

1) Paravirtual mouse (needed to get mouse coordinates right with multi monitor setups)
2) Send client monitor configuration, so that the guest os can adjust its resolution
    (and number and place of monitors) to match the client
3) Copy and paste in a platform neutral manner, if anyone wishes to add this to another agent
    please, please contact us (me) first. This is easy to get wrong (we went through 2 revisions
    of the protocol for this).
4) Allow the client to request the guest to tone down the bling (for low spec clients)

Notes:
1) All of these are client <-> guest communication, rather then the host <-> guest communication
which the other agents seem to focus on.

2) Getting copy paste right requires a system level guest agent process as well as a per user
session agent process.

Regards,

Hans