Virtio without the "virt"

Posted Nov 25, 2019 2:58 UTC (Mon) by pjhacnau (subscriber, #4223)
In reply to: Virtio without the "virt" by nim-nim
Parent article: Virtio without the "virt"

"That smells like a HAL…"

IIUC I'd agree more with the previous comment - it's like USB classes, at least in the first case. You end up designing hardware to match the virtio class and there's no extra driver code. Like the way there's a single driver that handles any class-compliant usb-audio device. To me that's the inverse of a HAL.

Virtio without the "virt"

Posted Dec 12, 2019 22:02 UTC (Thu) by Syifrach (guest, #136043) [Link]

I fully agree with that. Even 'HW' implementations would use embedded processor to run the translation between VirtIO and proprietary DMA commands.
The levels of indirection provided by VirtIO are breaking any possible HW implementation.