Xen & VMI?

Ingo Molnar
2007-03-06T08:20:24Z

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