From: john cooper Subject: [PATCH 0/2] Add serial number support for virtio_blk, V4 Date: Fri, 29 May 2009 00:14:40 -0400 Message-ID: <4A1F6130.9070705@redhat.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: john.cooper@redhat.com, Rusty Russell , Christoph Hellwig To: KVM list , qemu-devel@nongnu.org Return-path: Received: from mx2.redhat.com ([66.187.237.31]:49082 "EHLO mx2.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751041AbZE2ERS (ORCPT ); Fri, 29 May 2009 00:17:18 -0400 Sender: kvm-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: [Rework of earlier patch to provide additional information in the response to an ATA identify request -- virtio_blk treats the data as opaque, content created by qemu's virtio-blk. Comments from Christoph also incorporated.] This patch allows passing of a virtio_blk drive serial number from qemu into a guest's virtio_blk driver, and provides a means to access the serial number from a guest's userspace. Equivalent functionality currently exists for IDE and SCSI, however it is not yet implemented for virtio. Scenarios exist where guest code relies on a unique drive serial number to correctly identify the machine environment in which it exists. The following two patches implement the above: qemu-vblk-serial-4.patch which provides the qemu missing bits to interpret a '-drive .. serial=XYZ ..' flag, and: virtio_blk-serial-4.patch which extracts this information and makes it available to guest userspace via an HDIO_GET_IDENTITY ioctl, eg: 'hdparm -i /dev/vda'. The above patches are relative to qemu-kvm.git and 2.6.29.3 respectively. -john -- john.cooper@redhat.com