Re: Xen as a kernel module

[Jacob Gorm Hansen <jacobg@diku.dk>]

Kip Macy wrote:
> I'm obviously partisan, but I think that would largely defeat the
> privilege de-coupling that they're trying to achieve. Not to mention
> nullifying the notion of a driver domain.

Is anyone actually using driver domains, other than dom0? It would be 
really cool if hardware vendors started shipping drivers in Xen-VM 
format, but until that happens I do not see much motivation for having 
multiple full Linuxes around just to achieve a limited amount of isolation.

It is no secret that I much preferred the old and simpler model, but I 
understand that noone likes having to port drivers, and I guess this is 
one reason for the current state of things. With Xen inside the host OS 
kernel, you would get the performance of the old model, and the ease of 
development of the new model, plus potentially the option of running Xen 
on millions of Windows-desktops (I am sure the Silicon Valley VCs would 
love to hear that ;-)).

With all the OSes currently ported to Xen, the Xen hypercall interface 
could become a de-facto standard for paravirtualized OSes, especially if 
Xen were able to run on top of Windows as well as on top of Linux.

Jacob


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