Re: Zen and Pacifica

[Dave Feustel <dfeustel@mindspring.com>]

On Monday 03 April 2006 09:33, Petersson, Mats wrote:

> > Will 3.0.2 support running unmodified operating systems?
> > That's the feature I need to run OpenBSD under Xen.
> 
> Yes, absolutely. However, I must "warn" you that OpenBSD is not on our
> "target-list", so it's possible (although somewhat unlikely) that it
> will not work right - every OS has it's own quirks during specific small
> sections of code (switch from real to protected mode [particularly code
> that "abuses" this switch, like "Big Real-Mode" can cause problems, as
> the internal state of the processor and the "apparent state" aren't the
> same[1]], page table updates, special IO operations, etc) that may need
> some special attention in the hypervisor. 

Well, I'm not buying a new system until I can get one with the AMD SVR 
(formerly known as Pacifica) revision F chip version, so there are still a
few months to go. Once I have the system, I will get busy trying to run
OpenBSD on Xen. I am prepared for xen startup issues with openbsd.

> I'm not at all saying "Don't do this", but rather setting your
> expectations that it's a small possibility that something is broken.
> It's probably not very hard to fix if it is, it just takes someones time
> to figure out why it's broken, and how to fix it - usually, it's just a
> simple case of another "if (x) do_something_special();" in some
> function. And I'd say there's 98% chance that it works just fine as is.
> 2% risk that there's a problem... 
> 
> Also, there's a few months yet until the second half of this year, so we
> may well have fixed all the remaining bugs 'til then... ;-)

Patience is a virtue, particularly where AMD is concerned :-). 
All good things come to those who wait.
Good Things Take Time.

Dave Feustel

> [1] If anyone wants more details on how this works, please fire me a
> personal mail... ;-)
> 
> --
> Mats
> > 
> > When is 3.0.2 likely to be released?
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Dave 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Xen-devel mailing list
> > Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com
> > http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
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> 

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