Saturday, January 03, 2026

Re: virtio-serial support, viocon driver?

On Sat, Jan 03, 2026 at 08:11:02PM -0800, Mike Larkin wrote:

> Should we remove this if it's dead code? Or finish it? Or enable it if it was
> finished but someone forgot to enable it?

I enabled debugging and it looks like it doesn't support the multiport
extension:

viocon0 at virtio5 -MultiPort -EmergWrite +RingIndirectDesc -RingEventIdx +Version1

I haven't been able to get it to work, not sure if that's why.
Originally qemu had a "virtio-console" device that only supported a
single port, then it was enhanced to be called "virtio-serial" and
supported multiple ports per device:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/VirtioSerial

I feel like there's a mismatch between the driver and the newer virtual
serial port hardware, but this level of driver operation isn't my usual
forte so I can't say for sure.

From my perspective, it would be great if somebody updated it :), but
enabling it as it is doesn't seem a good idea as it doesn't appear to
work 8-/.

It looks like the FreeBSD virtio_console driver supports the current
multiport virtio-serial device and works with qemu and the qemu guest
agent. The code is somewhat similar but also drastically different ;).

Thanks for the reply...

No comments:

Post a Comment