An interesting idea

I just had a rather interesting idea. One downside of using Xvnc for a paravirtual framebuffer is that it requires a TCP connection to dom0. This is problematic for a few reasons. The first is that it assumes networking is up which is generally a big fat assumption. Imagine the use-case of a distro installation.

The second problem is that Xen supports network interface crediting which is going to be an important feature for a lot of users. A paravirtual framebuffer is going to use a lot of bandwidth so this is not practical.

While thinking about how much work it would be to port Xvnc to user a shared memory ring queue, I had a revelation. Why not create a daemon that listens on a socket in domain-U and then transfers all the data on that socket via a ring queue to then expose it (as another socket) in domain-0. You now have a dedicated shared memory transport that doesn't require networking. It should be relatively high performance (certainly better than just using a vif).

Much more elegant than something like dedicating a vif.