Re: Xen & VMI?

Ingo Molnar
2007-03-06T21:11:55Z

* Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org> wrote:

> If you're seriously talking about an ABI, [...]

HELLO, this isnt a hypothetical!! The moment there's a xen_paravirt_ops,
Linux has DE FACTO committed itself to the Xen ABI: whatever
functionality the hypercall_page call table plus the int $0x82 interface
offers.

THE MOMENT any of that goes upstream and ships in a distro it's going to
be there forever! Try to change paravirt_ops or any core bit of Linux so
that this ABI cannot be sanely supported: 'fix it, you broke Xen!'. It
wont matter that paravirt_ops is 'internal' to Linux.

so trying to argue as if there was no ABI imposed on Linux by hiding the
Xen ABI behind paravirt_ops, and whistling into the air as if nothing
happened is misguided at best.

Ingo