The vm-device crate provides:

• device traits defining read and write operations on specialized buses
• device manager (bus-specific traits and a concrete implementation) for operating devices and dispatching I/O
• abstractions for defining resources and their constraints (e.g. a specific bus address range, IRQ number, etc)

The virtual device model is built around four traits, DevicePio and MutDevicePio for Programmed I/O (PIO), and DeviceMmio and MutDeviceMmio for Memory-mapped I/O (MMIO). The traits define the same methods for handling read and write operations. The difference is that DevicePio and DeviceMmio only require immutable self borrows, whereas MutDevicePio and MutDeviceMmio require mutable borrows.

The device manager abstraction is implemented by the IoManager struct. It defines two buses, one for PIO and one for MMIO. For each bus, with the help of the PioManager and MmioManager traits, the manager provides methods for device registration, as well as for dispatching read and write requests. The manager will determine which device is responsible for handling the I/O request based on the accessed address range, and will route the request to that device.

PioManager and MmioManager traits are useful as interfaces for a couple of reasons. First, to allow for alternative implementations when the provided IoManager is not sufficient. Second, to allow other crates depend on the traits without depending on the actual implementation.

The interaction between a guest kernel, a host kernel and a VMM using IoManager is depicted at the diagram below. A driver in the guest kernel issues an I/O request. That request gets turned by the host kernel’s hypervisor (KVM) into a trigger for the VMM to handle. The trigger is either a vCPU exit or an eventfd notification. The VMM extracts address information and determines the target bus. Then it dispatches a new request to the IoManager, which checks that there’s a virtual device registered on the bus for the requested address, and finally sends the request to that device.

A device is usually attached to a particular bus and thus needs to implement a trait of only one type. For example, serial port on x86 is a PIO device, while VirtIO devices use MMIO. It’s also possible for a device to implement both. Once the type of I/O is determined, the next step is to choose between mutable and immutable trait variant. If read or write method needs to mutate the device’s internal state, then the mutable variant must be used.

Before dispatching any I/O requests to the new device, it needs to be registered with an IoManager instance within the specified address range on the bus. Creating a new IoManager is easy by calling IoManager::new() without any configuration. Internally the manager stores devices as trait objects wrapped in Arc’s, therefore if the device implements MutDevicePio or MutDeviceMmio, then it must be wrapped in a Mutex. The crate contains automatic implementation of DevicePio for Mutex<T> where T: MutDevicePio and DeviceMmio for Mutex<T> where T: MutDeviceMmio but only for the Mutex type in the standard library. For any other Mutex type from 3rd party crates the blanket implementation must be done by the user.

From now on the IoManager will be routing I/O requests for the registered address range to the device. The requests are dispatched by the client code, for example when handling VM exits, using IoManager's methods pio_read, pio_write, mmio_read and mmio_write.

use std::sync::{Arc, Mutex};
use vm_device::bus::{PioAddress, PioAddressOffset, PioRange};
use vm_device::device_manager::{IoManager, PioManager};
use vm_device::MutDevicePio;

struct LogDevice {}

impl MutDevicePio for LogDevice {
    fn pio_read(&mut self, base: PioAddress, offset: PioAddressOffset, _data: &mut [u8]) {
        println!("mut pio_read: base {:?}, offset {}", base, offset);
    }

    fn pio_write(&mut self, base: PioAddress, offset: PioAddressOffset, data: &[u8]) {
        println!(
            "mut pio_write: base {:?}, offset {}, data {:?}",
            base, offset, data
        );
    }
}

fn main() {
    let mut manager = IoManager::new();
    let device = LogDevice {};
    let bus_range = PioRange::new(PioAddress(0), 10).unwrap();
    manager
        .register_pio(bus_range, Arc::new(Mutex::new(device)))
        .unwrap();
    manager.pio_write(PioAddress(0), &vec![b'o', b'k']).unwrap();
}

The vm-device is tested using unit tests and integration tests. It leverages rust-vmm-ci for continuous testing. All tests are ran in the rustvmm/dev container.

This project is licensed under either of:

• Apache License, Version 2.0
• BSD-3-Clause License