Re: Proposal for init/kexec/hotplug format for Xen

[Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>]

On Sun, 2005-02-27 at 10:53 +0000, Keir Fraser wrote:
> On 26 Feb 2005, at 20:57, Rusty Russell wrote:
> 
> > 	This has a degree of overlap with Jeremy's excellent work: I've been
> > looking at the bundling of device information passed to guest OSes when
> > they boot, and future uses for kexec and possibly the implementation of
> > hotplug.
> >
> > 	For kexec and bare-metal bringup, the PPC64 port uses a fairly simple
> > header + flattened tree of keyword/value pairs (on PPC64, used to hold
> > the Open Firmware tree plus Linux extras).  This offers flexibility for
> > new virtual devices, etc; I propose that we adopt this format or
> > something very similar for Xen, first by putting a pointer into it in
> > start_info_t, and then migrate entries across as appropriate.
> 
> I like the idea of bringing out device discovery, bringup, teardown, 
> recovery all into its own driver or subsystem -- it seems the obvious 
> way to go. But I think the 'device tree' should be in the 
> to-be-designed persistent store, and we publish an interface to allow 
> guests to peek/poke that store.

OK, I'll hack some simple code together in anticipation of you supplying
a place to put it.  The PPC64 code has baggage we don't want, but the
tree-of-keyword-value-pairs idea is a winner I think.

I'll give you a call Monday and if you're free I'll head over to
Cambridge and show you what I've got.

Thanks!
Rusty.
-- 
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver -- Richard Braakman



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