Re: Xen & VMI?

Gerd Hoffmann
2007-03-06T08:37:21Z

Ingo Molnar wrote:
> 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?

IIRC there was some proof-of-concept at least for xen guests.

> 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_.

I fail to see how xen-via-vmirom instead of xen-via-paravirt_ops reduces
the QA effort. You still have 5 Hypervisors you have to test against.

cheers,
Gerd

--
Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@suse.de>