Re: A proposal - binary

Andrew Morton
2006-08-04T07:21:40Z

On Fri, 04 Aug 2006 17:04:59 +1000
Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> wrote:

> On Thu, 2006-08-03 at 22:53 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Fri, 04 Aug 2006 15:04:35 +1000
> > Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> wrote:
> >
> > > On Thu, 2006-08-03 at 21:18 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > Everywhere in the kernel where we have multiple implementations we want
> > > to select at runtime, we use an ops struct. Why should the choice of
> > > Xen/VMI/native/other be any different?
> >
> > VMI is being proposed as an appropriate way to connect Linux to Xen. If
> > that is true then no other glue is needed.
>
> Sorry, this is wrong.

It's actually 100% correct.

> VMI was proposed as the appropriate way to
> connect Linux to Xen, *and* native, *and* VMWare's hypervisors (and
> others). This way one Linux binary can boot on all three, using
> different VMI blobs.

That also is correct.

> > > Yes, we could force native and Xen to work via VMI, but the result would
> > > be less clear, less maintainable, and gratuitously different from
> > > elsewhere in the kernel.
> >
> > I suspect others would disagree with that. We're at the stage of needing
> > to see code to settle this.
>
> Wrong again.

I was referring to the VMI-for-Xen code.

> We've *seen* the code for VMI, and fairly hairy.

I probably slept through that discussion - I don't recall that things were
that bad. Do you recall the Subject: or date?