From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Harry Butterworth <harry@hebutterworth.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Questioning the Xen Design of the VMM
Date: Tue, 08 Aug 2006 10:17:13 +0100
Message-ID: <1155028633.7709.2.camel@localhost.localdomain>
References: <200608071801.23845.a1426z@gawab.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Return-path: <xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com>
In-Reply-To: <200608071801.23845.a1426z@gawab.com>
List-Unsubscribe: <http://lists.xensource.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xen-devel>,
	<mailto:xen-devel-request@lists.xensource.com?subject=unsubscribe>
List-Post: <mailto:xen-devel@lists.xensource.com>
List-Help: <mailto:xen-devel-request@lists.xensource.com?subject=help>
List-Subscribe: <http://lists.xensource.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xen-devel>,
	<mailto:xen-devel-request@lists.xensource.com?subject=subscribe>
Sender: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com
Errors-To: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com
To: Al Boldi <a1426z@gawab.com>
Cc: xen-devel@lists.xensource.com
List-Id: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org

On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 18:01 +0300, Al Boldi wrote:
> Greetings!
> 
> The Xen project caught my attention on LKML discussing hypervisors, so I took 
> a look at Xen and read the README, where it says:
> 
> 	This install tree contains source for a Linux 2.6 guest
> 
> This immediately turned me off, as I hoped Xen would be a bit more 
> transparent, by simply exposing native hw tunneled thru some multiplexed Xen 
> patched host-kernel driver.
> 
> I maybe missing something, but why should the Xen-design require the guest to 
> be patched?

Xen runs with high performance without binary translation on hardware
without virtualization support.  This requires patching the guest.

With hardware virtualization support Xen can run the guest unmodified.