Re: Xen is a feature

Avi Kivity
2009-06-02T19:06:34Z

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> The point? Xen really is horribly badly separated out. It gets way more
> incestuous with other systems than it should. It's entirely possible that
> this is very fundamental to both paravirtualization and to hypervisor
> behavior, but it doesn't matter - it just measn that I can well see that
> Xen is a f*cking pain to merge.
>
> So please, Xen people, look at your track record, and look at the issues
> from the standpoint of somebody merging your code, rather than just from
> the standpoint of somebody who whines "I want my code to be merged".
>
> IOW, if you have trouble getting your code merged, ask yourself what _you_
> are doing wrong.
>

There is in fact a way to get dom0 support with nearly no changes to
Linux, but it involves massive changes to Xen itself and requires
hardware support: run dom0 as a fully virtualized guest, and assign it
all the resources dom0 can access. It's probably a massive effort though.

I've considered it for kvm when faced with the "I want a thin
hypervisor" question: compile the hypervisor kernel with PCI support but
nothing else (no CONFIG_BLOCK or CONFIG_NET, no device drivers), load
userspace from initramfs, and assign host devices to one or more
privileged guests. You could probably run the host with a heavily
stripped configuration, and enjoy the slimness while every interrupt
invokes the scheduler, a context switch, and maybe an IPI for good measure.

--
Do not meddle in the internals of kernels, for they are subtle and quick to panic.