Hello,

I am newbie to virtualization world. I have experience on driver development on linux system. I have a theoretical knowledge about full-virtualization and paravirtualization. I have googled and learnt about its concepts. (example : http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-virtio/)

I wanted to try writing drivers and get hands-on experience on it.
Could you please suggest
1. Any book/link which says how to write drivers on Host-OS (linux) and Guest-OS (linux) which talk to each other via hypervisor?
2. Any boards (example: Beagle board) on which I can test above driver code.

Thanks in advance,
best regards,
gmdn

Hello and welcome to LQ.

I think that what you are saying is, "How do I write a virtual device, one that a vm of some type will use much like a physical hardware device?" In VM's you basically have two ways to make the client act like a real computer. One is coded into the vm or added by some file. Some of those files can be seen in qemu sources for the various network and video choices. Another way is to passthrough the physical device to the client.


On some very recent systems and recent kernels you may be able to expose part of the real hardware to a vm. Generally termed pci passthough.

https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch...pcipassthrough
http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_PCI_Passthrough

I would think that that type of support would be more server board but could be gaining traction in other systems.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi Jefro,

Thanks a lot for the information. I will read through the provided links and get back with questions.

Basically, I want to start with simple virtual character driver with ioctls, which could be accessed from host.
I needed some information which says how to implement these virtual drivers (something like information mentioned in LDD by Alexandro Rubini)

Thanks and regards,
gmdn