From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Zachary Amsden Subject: Re: Xen & VMI? Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2007 18:16:25 -0800 Message-ID: <45EE2079.1060200@vmware.com> References: <20070306081909.GA9331@elte.hu> <45ED2837.3020108@suse.de> <20070306085222.GA17002@elte.hu> <45ED3121.8090308@suse.de> <20070306093436.GA30239@elte.hu> <45ED3F29.6000705@suse.de> <20070306102658.GA7478@elte.hu> <45ED4AD8.6020504@suse.de> <20070306115937.GA25313@elte.hu> <45ED9678.5050907@goop.org> <20070306171130.GA13403@elte.hu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20070306171130.GA13403@elte.hu> List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: virtualization-bounces@lists.osdl.org Errors-To: virtualization-bounces@lists.osdl.org To: Ingo Molnar Cc: virtualization , Jan Beulich , Andrew Morton , Linus Torvalds , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Roland McGrath List-Id: virtualization@lists.linuxfoundation.org Ingo Molnar wrote: > We do not let OpenOffice or Evolution have its own separate ABI to Linux = > so that they 'can evolve at their own pace'... We want them to cooperate = > and come up with a common ABI (or rather, we try to come up with the = > right syscalls ourselves), because divering, overlapping ABIs are a huge = > PITA. > = OpenOffice or Evolution are the completely wrong example. They disprove = your point more than they prove it. Consider any significantly large = cross-platform software like OpenOffice, Evolution, Firefox. You don't = let or restrict what these pieces of software do at all. They evolve at = their own pace, and they all build their very complicated and divergent = cross platform compatibility layers, with huge, overlapping APIs, = converging in places, diverging in others. > We do not unify their pointlessly diverging ABIs to within the kernel = > via say office_ops (while we could) because that's crappy on its face. = > Hypervisors arent in any way different, they just _think_ they are = > special because they are relatively new. But hey, i dont expect you to = > concede this point ;) No, you don't. The developers of Office and Evolution and Firefox do = that for you. And it's not crappy on its face because it provides real = value to them - the ability to run heterogeneously in multiple different = environments and across many different platforms and operating systems. Where your analogy is wrong is that in this case, Linux is very much = like one of those large software systems. It has complicated features = that require special plugins to work efficiently in different hypervisor = environments. And paravirt-ops is providing that functionality to = Linux, just as the platform layer of any large software system does and = very much should do. Zach