linux-kernel - Re: Xen & VMI?

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Message-ID: <45ED2837.3020108@suse.de>
Date:	Tue, 06 Mar 2007 09:37:11 +0100
From:	Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@...e.de>
To:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
Cc:	Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@...p.org>,
	virtualization <virtualization@...ts.osdl.org>,
	Jan Beulich <jbeulich@...ell.com>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Roland McGrath <roland@...hat.com>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Xen & VMI?

Ingo Molnar wrote:
> btw., while we have everyone on the phone and talking ;) Technologically 
> it would save us a whole lot of trouble in Linux if 'external' 
> hypervisors could standardize around a single ABI - such as VMI. Is 
> there any deep reason why Xen couldnt use VMI to talk to Linux? I 
> suspect a range of VMI vectors could be set aside for Xen's dom0 (and 
> other) APIs that have no current VMI equivalent - if there's broad 
> agreement on the current 60+ base VMI vectors that center around basic 
> x86 CPU capabilities - which make up the largest portion of our 
> paravirtualization complexity. Pipe dream?

IIRC there was some proof-of-concept at least for xen guests.

> there are already 5 major hypervisors we are going to support (in 
> alphabetical order):
> 
>  - KVM
>  - lguest
>  - Windows
>  - VMWare
>  - Xen
> 
> the QA matrix is gonna be a _mess_.

I fail to see how xen-via-vmirom instead of xen-via-paravirt_ops reduces
the QA effort.  You still have 5 Hypervisors you have to test against.

cheers,
  Gerd

-- 
Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@...e.de>
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