Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0 of 4] Add virtio-console support to qemu

[Christian Borntraeger]

Am Dienstag 13 Januar 2009 schrieb Avi Kivity:
> Christian Ehrhardt wrote:
> > To complete qemu virtio device support this patch series add 
virtio-console
> > infrastructure to qemu in patch 1/2.
> > Patch 3/4 initializes virtio-console on the tested architectures x86 and
> > powerpc.
> >   
> 
> What is the advantage of virtio-console, compared to the standard serial 
> port?

I cannot talk about the qemu version, but looking at kuli (the experimental 
kvm userspace for s390) these things come into my mind:

- it is not limited to to serial speed settings (9600..115200 etc.)
- the kernel driver of virtio_console has console resizing support. Adding 
resize support into qemu should be an easy addon patch, it was quite easy in 
kuli. This would be really cool. Running kvm with nographic and virtio 
console on stdio would allow vim or mc to get notifications about resizes of 
the underlying console - like running native.
- will work on platforms without a serial port (like s390) 

Maybe we can also use this to move existing lguest guests into kvm


Christian