[ANNOUNCE] Xen port to Cortex-A15 / ARMv7 with virt extensions

[stefano.stabellini@eu.citrix.com (Stefano Stabellini)]

On Tue, 29 Nov 2011, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Tuesday 29 November 2011, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > a few weeks ago I (and a few others) started hacking on a
> > proof-of-concept hypervisor port to Cortex-A15 which uses and requires
> > ARMv7 virtualization extensions. The intention of this work was to find
> > out how to best support ARM v7+ on Xen. See
> > http://old-list-archives.xen.org/archives/html/xen-arm/2011-09/msg00013.html
> > for more details. 
> > 
> > I am pleased to announce that significant progress has been made, and
> > that we now have a nascent Xen port for Cortex-A15. The port is based on
> > xen-unstable (HG CS 8d6edc3d26d2) and written from scratch exploiting
> > the latest virtualization, LPAE, GIC and generic timer support in
> > hardware.
> 
> Very nice!
> 
> Do you have a pointer to the kernel sources for the Linux guest?

We have very few changes to the Linux kernel at the moment (only 3
commits!), just enough to be able to issue hypercalls and start a PV
console.


A git branch is available here (not ready for submission):

git://xenbits.xen.org/people/sstabellini/linux-pvhvm.git arm

the branch above is based on git://linux-arm.org/linux-2.6.git arm-lpae,
even though guests don't really need lpae support to run on Xen.


> Since Xen and KVM are both in an early working state right now,
> it would be very nice if we could agree on the guest model to make
> sure that it's always possible to run the same kernel in both
> (and potentially other future) hypervisors without modifications.

Yes, that would be ideal.
We don't plan on making many changes other than enabling PV frontends
and backends.