Re: Paravirtualization on VMware's Platform [VMI].

Ingo Molnar
2009-09-22T08:10:17Z

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

> On 09/20/09 02:00, Avi Kivity wrote:
> > On 09/20/2009 10:52 AM, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> >> On Sun, 20 Sep 2009 09:42:47 +0200
> >> Ingo Molnar<mingo@elte.hu> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>> If we were able to rip out all (or most) of paravirt from arch/x86 it
> >>> would be tempting for other technical reasons - but the patch above
> >>> is well localized.
> >>>
> >> interesting question is if this would allow us to remove a few of the
> >> paravirt hooks....
> >>
> >
> > kvm will be removing the pvmmu support soon; and Xen is talking about
> > running paravirtualized guests in a vmx/svm container where they don't
> > need most of the hooks.
>
> We have no plans to drop support for non-vmx/svm capable processors,
> let alone require ept/npt.

But, just to map out our plans for the future, do you concur with the
statements and numbers offered here by the VMware and KVM folks that
on sufficiently recent hardware, hardware-assisted virtualization
outperforms paravirt_ops in many (most?) workloads?

I.e. paravirt_ops becomes a legacy hardware thing, not a core component
of the design of arch/x86/.

(with a long obsoletion period, of course.)

Thanks,

Ingo