Virtio-serial API

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Revision as of 07:20, 2 September 2010 by Amit (talk | contribs)

Guest API

Function Linux guest Windows guest
Port discovery symlinks from /dev/virtio-port/<portname> to /dev/vportNpn as mentioned in http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/VMchannel_Requirements#Invocation and http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/VirtioSerial#How_To_Test
Opening port open(2).
  • Returns >= 0 on success.
  • Only one open allowed at a time for a port.
Reading read(2).
  • Blocking as well as non-blocking reads available.
  • Return 0 if host is not connected.
  • Block or -EAGAIN if data not available.
  • Errno will contain -ENODEV if port or device get hot-unplugged
Writing write(2).
  • Blocking as well as non-blocking.
  • If host is not connected, write blocks or returns -EAGAIN.
  • Errno will contain -ENODEV if port or device got hot-unplugged.
Poll poll().
  • POLLIN, POLLOUT with usual meaning.
  • POLLHUP when host is not connected or when port or device got unplugged
Asynchronous notifications signal(7)
  • From kernel 2.6.37, SIGIO will be sent to guest apps that set O_ASYNC flag on the fd using fcntl(2).
  • SIGIO will be sent on host connection up, down and port unplug events.


For an example of a C program that uses the virtio-serial Linux guest API, see auto-virtserial-guest.c


Host API

There's an in-qemu host API exposed by the virtio-serial code. The following is true for the in-qemu API for qemu version 0.13 and for the qemu version found in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0, straight from hw/virtio-serial.h:

/*
 * Individual ports/apps should call this function to register the port
 * with the virtio-serial bus
 */
void virtio_serial_port_qdev_register(VirtIOSerialPortInfo *info);
/*
 * Open a connection to the port
 *   Returns 0 on success (always).
 */
int virtio_serial_open(VirtIOSerialPort *port);
/*
 * Close the connection to the port
 *   Returns 0 on success (always).
 */
int virtio_serial_close(VirtIOSerialPort *port);
/*
 * Send data to Guest
 */
ssize_t virtio_serial_write(VirtIOSerialPort *port, const uint8_t *buf,
                            size_t size);
/*
 * Query whether a guest is ready to receive data.
 */
size_t virtio_serial_guest_ready(VirtIOSerialPort *port);
/*
 * Flow control: Ports can signal to the virtio-serial core to stop
 * sending data or re-start sending data, depending on the 'throttle'
 * value here.
 */
void virtio_serial_throttle_port(VirtIOSerialPort *port, bool throttle);

In addition to this, the VirtIOSerialPortInfo struct has a function pointer for a callback to be called when guest writes some data to the port:

   /*
    * Guest wrote some data to the port. This data is handed over to
    * the app via this callback.  The app is supposed to consume all
    * the data that is presented to it.
    */
   void (*have_data)(VirtIOSerialPort *port, const uint8_t *buf, size_t len);

For an example use of this API, see hw/virtio-console.c