Re: Porting KVM to Mac OS?

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

Alexander Graf wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 25.01.2009, at 09:16, Neo Jia wrote:
>
>> hi,
>>
>> I am thinking if it is possible to port KVM to Mac OS (leopard). Is
>> there anybody doing this already?
>
> I've considered doing it, but haven't gotten around to it, due to lack 
> of inspiration.
> The biggest problem IMHO is the sync. Rewriting a kvm module for Mac 
> OS X should be fairly easy, but you'll miss all the good bugfixes from 
> upstream. Using the upstream code with a wrapper on the other hand is 
> probably a really big hassle, because osx doesn't really know about 
> mmu notifiers and a lot of other Linux internal things.

Most of the special Linux internal things are optional when using the 
external kernel modules (in order to support older host kernels).  If 
you rely on that, there shouldn't be a huge amount of Linux-specific 
dependencies.

Best thing to do would be to avoid touching the KVM source code as much 
as humanly possible, and try to write a compatibility layer on top of 
the external kernel modules.  You could even use awk trickery like make 
sync does.  That way you can get bugfixes almost for free.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> So if you come up with a good idea for this problem, I'd be glad to 
> help you out as much as time permits :-).
>
> Alex
>
>> If it is possible, which KVM release should I use as a start?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Neo
>> -- 
>> I would remember that if researchers were not ambitious
>> probably today we haven't the technology we are using!
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