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NAME

pvbus — paravirtual device tree root

SYNOPSIS

pvbus0 at mainbus0

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/ioctl.h>
#include <dev/pv/pvvar.h>

DESCRIPTION

pvbus is used on virtual machines that are running on hypervisors. It provides a pseudo-bus for all paravirtual devices that do not attach to a well-known bus like pci(4). The pvbus driver is responsible for detecting the hypervisor interface, checking the capabilities, attaching the paravirtual devices, and providing access to supported information stores.

IOCTL INTERFACE

pvbus supports ioctl(2) commands to exchange information with the hypervisor interface, as implemented in the hostctl(8) program. Each detected hypervisor interface is available as a character special device file, /dev/pvbus0, /dev/pvbus1, etc. All available commands use the same pvbus_req structure:

struct pvbus_req {
	size_t			 pvr_keylen;
	char			*pvr_key;
	size_t			 pvr_valuelen;
	char			*pvr_value;
};

The caller is responsible for attaching character buffers to the pvr_key and pvr_value fields and to set their length in pvr_keylen and pvr_valuelen accordingly. All keys and values are nul-terminated strings.

The following ioctl(2) commands are available:

PVBUSIOC_KVREAD

Read the value from pvr_key and return it in pvr_value.

PVBUSIOC_KVTYPE

Return the type of the attached hypervisor interface as a string in pvr_key; see Supported hypervisors.

PVBUSIOC_KVWRITE

Write the new value pvr_value to the key pvr_key. This command requires write permissions on the device file.

FILES

/dev/pvbusu

pvbus device unit u file.

SEE ALSO

autoconf(4), intro(4), mainbus(4), vmm(4), hostctl(8)

HISTORY

The pvbus pseudo-bus first appeared in OpenBSD 5.8.

AUTHORS

The pvbus pseudo-bus was written by Reyk Floeter <reyk@openbsd.org>.