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Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 09:19:09 +0100
From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
To: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>
Cc: Zachary Amsden <zach@vmware.com>, Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>,
       virtualization <virtualization@lists.osdl.org>,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
       Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
       Roland McGrath <roland@redhat.com>, Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Jan Beulich <jbeulich@novell.com>
Subject: Xen & VMI?
Message-ID: <20070306081909.GA9331@elte.hu>
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btw., while we have everyone on the phone and talking ;) Technologically 
it would save us a whole lot of trouble in Linux if 'external' 
hypervisors could standardize around a single ABI - such as VMI. Is 
there any deep reason why Xen couldnt use VMI to talk to Linux? I 
suspect a range of VMI vectors could be set aside for Xen's dom0 (and 
other) APIs that have no current VMI equivalent - if there's broad 
agreement on the current 60+ base VMI vectors that center around basic 
x86 CPU capabilities - which make up the largest portion of our 
paravirtualization complexity. Pipe dream?

there are already 5 major hypervisors we are going to support (in 
alphabetical order):

 - KVM
 - lguest
 - Windows
 - VMWare
 - Xen

the QA matrix is gonna be a _mess_. Okay, lguest and KVM is special 
because both the client and the server side is in the same source code, 
so the ABI [if any] is alot easier to manage. That still leaves another 
three...

	Ingo