Re: [Qemu-devel] qemu-ga -- virtio driver version reporting

[Marc-André Lureau]

Hi

On Fri, Aug 2, 2019 at 5:12 PM Tomáš Golembiovský <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I would like to add version reporting of Windows virtio drivers to qemu-ga.
> Obviously this is specific to Windows as for POSIX systems it corelates with
> the version of kernel. I would appreciate your ideas on a few topics.
>
> Does it make sense to add this information as new (optonal) field to result of
> 'guest-get-osinfo'. Or would it be better to add whole new command? I expect

If the information is cheap to retrieve, I think it is fine as part of
get-osinfo.

> the result to look something like this:
>
>     "component-versions": [
>         {
>             "name": "VirtIO Balloon Driver",
>             "version": "03/10/2019,62.77.104.16900"
>         },
>         {
>             "name": "QEMU PVPanic Device",
>             "version": "06/11/2018,62.76.104.15400"
>         },
>         ...
>     ]

I am not a Windows expert, but I can imagine drivers have a more
uniquely identifiable ID than a human string.

>
> Alternatively we could report all available versions of the specific
> driver instead of just the latest. Note that this does not say much
> about which version is in use or if a device is available in the
> system.

What's the goal of this version reporting btw? to audit the VM? Isn't
there other mechanism to keep Windows systems up to date and alert
management layers? Perhaps that's Windows business/enterprise
solutions that are too expensive though, and we want something more
specific to qemu VMs.

>
>
> I have checked the available drivers and the names quite vary. I guess we'll
> need to list and match the complete name and not just some substring (like
> "VirtIO"). See the following list:
>
>     QEMU FWCfg Device
>     QEMU PVPanic Device
>     QEMU Serial PCI Card
>     Red Hat Q35 SM Bus driver
>     Red Hat QXL controller
>     Red Hat VirtIO Ethernet Adapter
>     Red Hat VirtIO SCSI controller
>     Red Hat VirtIO SCSI controller
>     Red Hat VirtIO SCSI pass-through controller
>     VirtIO Balloon Driver
>     VirtIO Input Driver
>     VirtIO RNG Device
>     VirtIO Serial Driver
>     VirtIO-Serial Driver
>
> Is it OK to hardcode the list in qemu-ga source? Is there already any support
> for dealing with regexes or tries in qemu source tree?

glib has GRegexp.

>
> Any other ideas, concerns?
>
>     Tomas
>
> --
> Tomáš Golembiovský <address@hidden>