Re: [Qemu-devel] [SeaBIOS] [PATCH] don't expose pvpanic device in the UI

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Tue, Aug 06, 2013 at 03:00:06PM +0300, Gleb Natapov wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 06, 2013 at 01:23:49PM +0200, Andreas Färber wrote:
> > Am 06.08.2013 13:00, schrieb Gleb Natapov:
> > > On Tue, Aug 06, 2013 at 12:35:10PM +0200, Andreas Färber wrote:
> > >> I wonder if IPMI might be such an alternative in the future, in which
> > >> case we should come up with some way to fully disable pvpanic device
> > >> creation. CC'ing Corey.
> > >>
> > > IPMI was considered, to complicated for what was needed.
> > 
> > Sorry? There's nothing wrong with going for pvpanic as a simple
> > implementation.
> > 
> Sure, why "sorry" then? :) PV has its benefits.

PV always seems easier. It sometimes becomes a maintainance problem
down the way though.

> > There have been IPMI patchsets on qemu-devel though, and SUSE will be
> > investigating adding some IPMI support too (not sure if identical to the
> > scope of those patchsets), whether IPMI is complicated or not. It's a
> > standard present on physical servers, facilitating unified management of
> > virtual and physical servers, and there's OpenIPMI as implementation.
> > 
> Of course, there is nothing wrong with implementing IPMI either. Many
> problems that IPMI solves are much simpler to solve in virtualized
> environment with management software and pvpanic closes one gap
> between what IPMI provides and virtual machine management can do.
> 
> > My point was, there may be alternative, non-PV implementations to suck
> > such information out of a guest, IPMI being one example of a management
> > interface that exists for physical servers. So it's not necessarily
> > black-or-white, but choices similar to virtio vs. IDE vs. AHCI vs. SCSI.
> > 
> pvpanic not meant to replace IPMI though.

But will you want pvpanic if you have IPMI?

> --
>                       Gleb.