Hi,

In my last survey of assigned device numbers I went through all the currently assigned device numbers and attempted to glean their current status. However we currently don't have any devices that might be useful in a Cloud Native development environment.

To define terms cloud native is the idea you can build a workload processing element as a VM and run it in the cloud. It consumes data from virtio-devices and processes it in someway. This VM can then be moved from being hosted in the cloud and into a real platform which still provides it's data via a virtio device. The idea being you get the same behaviour (as well as allowing for data to be recorded so future debugging/tuning work can be done in the cloud).

Currently most of the virtio devices are actually data sinks - for example for virtio-video the guest pushes data to the video device for it to process. What we need is a device(s?) to be a source of data to feed to these workloads.

Why virtio-media-source? Well rather than creating a device for every data type maybe it would make more sense to have a generic device which can advertise the data stream info in it's configuration space. This would allow the kernel driver to then route the data to the appropriate kernel subsystem (e.g. v4l or alsa).

Would having a virtio driver potentially feeding different sub-systems based on configuration be a problem?

What do people think?