[libvirt] Adding VirtualBox support to libvirt

[Pritesh Kothari]

Hi,

As mentioned in the earlier mail, I have started the work on 
adding Virtualbox support to libvirt. I have completed almost
all the basic functionality. Currently I can start, shutdown,
reboot, list and suspend/resume the domains.

Now I am in the process writing code for creating/defining the domains
and thats where i need some help. I am not familiar with the exact XML format 
required. I have gone through the docs at http://libvirt.org/formatdomain.html 
as well as the code and have few question regarding the same as below:

Is the XML format for defining the Domains common to all the hypervisors? If 
not then how should I start about defining it for Virtualbox?

What exactly does the tag <os_type>xen</os_type> exactly mean? how can xen, 
hvm, etc be an os type?

why virDomainCreate doesn't actually create the domain but it just starts it? 
(virDomainCreateXML actually creates it)

The rest of my question are more general and not related to XML def.

In src/qemu_driver.c:qemudGetVersion() why does the qemu driver have to take 
the lock, i mean what can change while extracting the version info? is there 
any specific reason? (this is true for other drivers like openvz, uml, etc as 
well )

I am using dlopen() and friends to open the VirtualBox library at runtime, is 
it ok? cause I didn't see any driver doing something like this.

Regards,
-pritesh

On Wednesday 03 December 2008 14:26:30 Daniel Veillard wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 02:20:44PM +0100, Pritesh Kothari wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am in the process of adding support for virtualbox in libvirt.
> >
> > Basically Virtualbox exports its API through XPCOM. Now to simplify
> > things I was thinking of using C++ and already existing xpcom component
> > in virtualbox but since libvirt exports C API i am not sure if i should
> > use C++ or stick to plain C.
> >
> > I would like to request the libvirt community for its comment
> > on this.
>
>   please use plain C if you want the support to be incorporated,
> check existing recent drivers code to see how to handle the XML format
> parsing and saving, also make sure you don't need too much extra
> libraries and that their Licence is compatible with the LGPL of libvirt
> otherwise the code will be unusable in the end.
>
>    thanks !
>
> Daniel