Re: GPL release of Virtual Iron sources

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>]

Ben Thomas wrote:
> Hi Anthony,
>
> Good to hear from you.  We really believe in the value of open
> source and the opportunities that it provides for creativity.
> I know that I mentioned in the original post that we've made
> our source available in toto for reasons of time, with
> patches to the existing open source to follow.  What's perhaps
> a bit confusing is that we also released, in the same source
> base, a number of differences in the control plane.  Our main
> intersection of interest with the currently implemented
> open source project is in the hypervisor.  We look forward to
> providing the patches to the hypervisor and getting changes back
> into that code base.

Right.  AFAICT, you're changes to the control plane would break guest 
compatibility.  For HVM, this really doesn't matter of course but it 
does matter for PV.  But now that I imagine you're committed to a 
different ABI, if changes need to happen to be acceptable for Xen, you 
can't do it without breaking your users.

Likewise, we're committed to the current ABI so breaking it to support 
your ABI is a bit of a problem.

Am I correct here in these assumptions?  Are you guys willing to break 
your ABI to try and get some of these ideas in?

I've been through a good chunk of the dom0 code.  Not exactly sure I 
would have done it the same way but I do like some of the general 
concepts (like a smaller userspace toolchain).

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> You're correct in noting that we also released other code.  It, too,
> is released under GPL and is free for anyone to make any use of
> it as they see fit.  If there is interest, advantange or opportunity
> in incorporating any of this into the existing open source project,
> we'll be happy to assist in whatever way we're able.  I believe that
> there are many ways and scenarios in which the existing code may
> be put to use.  The community has been terrific in moving forward on
> one of the many possible solution sets.  I'd love to see where else
> our combined creativity can take us.
>
> Thanks for your continued interest,
> -b
>
>
> Anthony Liguori wrote:
>> This is a rather radical departure from where Xen is currently 
>> going.  Is your goal to get this stuff in mainline or were you just 
>> making everyone aware of your changes?
>>
>> If you're interested in getting it into mainline, we can discuss some 
>> of the details but as I said, this is rather different from where Xen 
>> is currently going...
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Anthony Liguori
>>
>
>
>