RE: Merge Xen (the hypervisor) into Linux

Dan Magenheimer
2009-06-03T00:02:30Z

That sound you heard was 10000 xen-users@lists.xensource.com
all having heart attacks at once.

Need I say more.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ingo Molnar [mailto:mingo@elte.hu]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 02, 2009 5:29 PM
> To: Steven Rostedt
> Cc: George Dunlap; David Miller; jeremy@goop.org; Dan Magenheimer;
> avi@redhat.com; xen-devel@lists.xensource.com; x86@kernel.org;
> linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org; Keir Fraser;
> torvalds@linux-foundation.org; gregkh@suse.de; Kurt Hackel; Ian Pratt;
> xen-users@lists.xensource.com; ksrinivasan; EAnderson@novell.com;
> wimcoekaerts@wimmekes.net; Stephen Spector; Jens Axboe;
> npiggin@suse.de
> Subject: Merge Xen (the hypervisor) into Linux
>
>
>
> * Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:
>
> > Now here's a crazy solution. Merge the Xen hypervisor into Linux
> > ;-)
>
> That's not that crazy - it's the right technical solution if DOM0 is
> desired for upstream. From what i've seen in DOM0 land the incestous
> dependencies are really only long-term manageable if the whole thing
> is in a single tree.
>
> A lot of Xen legacies could be dropped: the crazy ring1 hack on
> 32-bit, the various wide interfaces to make pure-software
> virtualization limp along. All major CPUs shipped with hardware
> virtualization support in the past 2-3 years, so the availability of
> VMX and SVM can be taken for granted for such a project.
>
> That cuts down on a fair amount of crap. A lot of code on the Linux
> side could be reused, and a pure CONFIG_PCI=y (all other things
> disabled) would provide a "slim hypervisor" instance with a very
> small and concentrated code base. (That 'slim hypervisor' might even
> be built with CONFIG_NOMMU.)
>
> That way dom0 would be a natural extension: a minimal interface
> between Linux-Xen-minimal and the dom0 guest instance.
>
> It's a sane technical model IMO, and makes dom0 a lot more
> palatable. Having in-tree competition to KVM would also obviously be
> good to Linux in general.
>
> Ingo
>