Re: [RFC] CPUID usage for interaction between Hypervisors and Linux.

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

Alok Kataria wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-10-01 at 11:04 -0700, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
>   
> 2. Divergence in the interface provided by the hypervisors  : 
> 	The reason we brought up a flat hierarchy is because we think we should
> be moving towards a approach where the guest code doesn't diverge too
> much when running under different hypervisors. That is the guest
> essentially does the same thing if its running on say Xen or VMware.
>
> This design IMO, will take us a step backward to  what we already have
> seen with para virt ops. Each hypervisor (mostly) defines its own cpuid
> block, the guest correspondingly needs to have code to handle each of
> these cpuid blocks, with these blocks will mostly being exclusive.
>   

What's wrong with what we have in paravirt_ops?  Just agreeing on CPUID 
doesn't help very much.  You still need a mechanism for doing hypercalls 
to implement anything meaningful.  We aren't going to agree on a 
hypercall mechanism.  KVM uses direct hypercall instructions, Xen uses a 
hypercall page, VMware uses VMI, Hyper-V uses MSR writes.  We all have 
already defined the hypercall namespace in a certain way.

We've already gone down the road of trying to make standard paravirtual 
interfaces (via virtio).  No one was sufficiently interested in 
collaborating.  I don't see why other paravirtualizations are going to 
be much different.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori