[Spice-devel] creating devices on the fly (smartcard ccid readers)

[Alon Levy]

Hi,

 I have most of the changes for adding smartcard readers to spice ready, with the exception of the actual creation/removal of readers during runtime.

 Basically I want the guest to see the amount of readers that the client has. Which can be zero or more.

 SpiceCoreInterface doesn't allow creation/removal of devices and chardevs. Right now it seems to be the right direction - add some calls (two) for that, following qemu API closely (exactly). Another option would be using QMP, not sure if it is possible to create and destroy devices and chardev's that way.

 The other option would be to create a bunch of devices the usual way, via -chardev spicevmc,id=smartcard,name=smartcard -device usb-ccid,chardev=smartcard, but have them dormant on start until they get some message to activate. This would not require any changes to SpiceCoreInteraface, but would be uglier obviously (requiring device changes specifically for spice).

 What do you think?

Alon