Hi,
- Possible security issues - VirtIO devices are PCI bus masters, thus
allowing real device (running, for example, in untrusted driver domain) to get control over guest's memory by writing to its memory
- VirtIO currently uses GFNs written into the shared ring, without Xen
grants support. This will require generic grant-mapping/sharing layer to be added to VirtIO.
- VirtIO requires QEMU PCI emulation for setting up a device. Xen PV
(and PVH) domains don't use QEMU for platform emulation in order to reduce attack surface. (PVH is in the process of gaining PCI config space emulation though, but it is optional, not a requirement)
Well, that is wrong. virtio doesn't require pci. There are other transports (mmio, ccw), and it should be possible to create a xen specific transport which uses grant tables properly. Seems there even was an attempt to implement that in 2011, see https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Virtio_On_Xen
- Most of the PV drivers a guest uses at the moment are Xen PV drivers,
e.g. net, block, console, so only virtio-gpu will require QEMU to run.
You are not forced to use qemu, you can certainly create an alternative host side implementation (and still use on the existing virtio guest drivers).
Whenever writing a xenbus implementation for both guest and host or writing a virtio implementation for the host only is better -- dunno. The virtio path obviously needs some infrastructure work for virtio support in Xen, which may pay off long term. Your call.
cheers, Gerd