Re: [kvm-ppc-devel] [RFC PATCH] current PowerPC patch

[Hollis Blanchard <hollisb-r/Jw6+rmf7HQT0dZR+AlfA@public.gmane.org>]

On Sat, 2007-10-20 at 00:15 +0200, Dor Laor wrote:
> Hollis Blanchard wrote:
> > This patch can now execute guest userspace (I'm not saying it's
> complete
> > or stable or anything though). I need to put together a more
> > full-featured ramdisk to test userspace more completely.
> >
> > That reminds me, what is the status of KVM VirtIO work? If I can put
> a
> > virt-io driver in the guest and not need to deal with storage device
> > emulation that would make me very happy.
> >
> >   
> Hi Hollis,
> Good luck for the new patch and the ongoing kvm arch support.
> Sadly KVM's virtio support didn't change much after the forum. Rusty
> did improve virtio shared mem and added  pci like configuration space
> as discussed in the forum.
> I was too busy with other things. The good thing is that in a week
> I'll be back on it.

OK.

> Nevertheless, even with pv block driver you'll need to boot with a 
> virtual device and then move to a pv one.
> It will remain this way until we'll add boot from pv support. It will 
> happen but further on. 

I guess you're talking about an x86 BIOS restriction? I don't expect
that to be a problem for us, since I'm not currently planning to execute
firmware inside the guest VM. That would require a lot of unnecessary
emulation to handle probing and very early configuration (e.g. SDRAM).

We can just inform the guest of the (virtual) system topology via the
device tree data structure, which is how firmware usually presents that
information on PowerPC systems.

-- 
Hollis Blanchard
IBM Linux Technology Center


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