Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [RFC][PATCH v6 08/23] virtagent: add va.getfile RPC

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 12:23:40PM -0600, Michael Roth wrote:
> getfile() is confusingly named however, it's really just a means to
> peek at a text file like /proc/meminfo.

You might as well reuse the libguestfs API here because you get the
benefit of all the code that's been written, all the tools on top, and
a far more comprehensive API that would take you another 2 years to
implement.

There's various ways to do it: Encapsulate the libguestfs API messages
to and from guestfsd into the virtagent protocol.  Or give us another
8-bit-clean channel.  Or write a libguestfs generator component that
generates virtagent messages.

We got a long way through porting guestfsd to Windows last year when
we thought we needed a Windows-native daemon (since abandoned for
other reasons).  It works already for many of the API calls.

> general file access will be done via a stateful interface that
> implements similar semantics to open()/read()/write()/close().

This will be very slow.

Rich.

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