--- Ramon van Handel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >For reference, VMWare has a minor for /dev/vmmon
> ("VMWare virtual
> >machine monitor") and a major for /dev/vmnet*
> ("VMWare virtual network
> >control").
>
> I've never quite understood what vmnet was for, but
> I guess we'll figure
> out what the problems are with other approaches as
> we try to implement them
> ;)
>
> -- Ramon
If I am interpreting their strategy correctly, they
seem to have set up different nodes for each network
port that the VMWare's client wishes to access. I am
not sure if this is really necessary.... especially
since we are not using the same internals as VMWare in
our code. I would guess that since one node has been
enough thus far, we may be able to continue the
project using only one node. The only thing that
comes to mind (to me, and I am no OS genuis) is that
their may be a possible performance benefit to having
multiple nodes to pass information to the host OS.
For example:
LINUX) the host OS passes things like video and
keyboard/mouse through normal channels and the device
node we currently use is explioted by the monitor;
there may be a benefit to having other nodes through
which the plugins may communicate with code _outside_
of the monitor directly as a standard device--like a
node to dump sound to a plex86 sound device client
program the runs as a separate entity, and handles the
inevitability that the guest and something else
running on the host may want to grab the sound device
at close enough intervals to cause a problem
Windows) the host looks for specific types of data
from specific places and thus the major/minor thing is
not directly a question..... it is more a matter of
how the plex86 VM emulated devices may benefit from
having their own real "devices" to pass specific types
of data through--especially important considering the
device models & drivers needed by the
dos/windows-shell environment.
As I said, I am no OS genuis, but these are the issues
at hand (that I know of to any, even small, extent)
when one talks about how many device nodes we may
really need in the end. Also, I don't know if it
would be possible to use a different number of devices
for different configurations (it would certainly make
windows happier, when we get to that juncture).
Drew Northup, N1XIM
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