[RFC PATCH 1/1] Add control path virtualization in virt_wifi

[Guillaume Hetier <Guillaume.Hetier@microsoft.com>]

Hi,

> Are there any specific applications you're thinking of?

Our main targets are programs setting up IOT devices: we want to give the guest the capacity to connect to specific networks created by the IOT device for the duration of their setup.
For that, we want to be able to scan, connect and reflect network properties precisely enough to let the guest programs go forward with the setup.

We would like to make our solution as generic as possible to be extendable and potentially support for complex use cases if possible, but we are not aiming for generic network management from the guest.

<snip>

>> Based on the discussion, your recommendations concerning our initial questions seem to be:
>> - we should create a new driver, rather than modifying virt_wifi
>
> Yes, for sure, I don't think virt_wifi makes sense.
>
>> - netlink could be used as a protocol to communicate with the host
>
> That was just a thought really. I've done it before for hwsim's wmediumd virtio abstraction, and it's not all that bad, but you could just as well declare structs for communication and go that simple way. Might over time end up with more compatibility code on the device side though (assuming you want to keep old Linux kernels running) Ultimately, it doesn't really matter to us - I'd think of it as a device, and people come up with all kinds of strange hardware all the time ;-)

Thanks for the confirmation!
For netlink, we think it could be a nice middle ground between the lack of compatibility of raw structures and the overhead of implementing yet another TLV parser. We will experiment with it and use it if it goes well.

Guillaume