[Kimchi-devel] Host Device Passthrough UI Task Discussion

[Aline Manera]

+1

On 07/16/2014 03:33 AM, Zhou Zheng Sheng wrote:
> 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.
>