Re: portability issues

["Jan Beulich" <jbeulich@novell.com>]

>>> Keir Fraser <keir@xensource.com> 21.06.07 11:58 >>>
>On 21/6/07 10:53, "Jan Beulich" <jbeulich@novell.com> wrote:
>
>>> (1) and (2): I want to kill off use of vcpu_guest_context in dom0 tools,
>>> make hvm save/restore a generic state load/save interface, and define
>>> extensible structures at that interface (pass a stream of state chunks back
>>> and forth at the interface, each chunk having a size in its header, and so
>>> increasing the size of a chunk allows it to be naturally appended to and
>>> hence extended).
>> 
>> I wasn't concerned about the tools interface. The real compatibility problem
>> is VCPUOP_initialize.
>
>I don't see the problem. The guest will not be able to initialise secondary
>VCPU's sysenter/syscall state via this interface. So what?

For (1), the guest will supply a too short guest_context structure, and
currently Xen has no way of detecting this. I was proposing two possible
solutions, neither of which seemed ideal to me.

For (2), I am just not certain whether there isn't an alternative not breaking
the interface for pure 32-bits.

Jan