Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751081AbWCOSjj (ORCPT ); Wed, 15 Mar 2006 13:39:39 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751178AbWCOSjj (ORCPT ); Wed, 15 Mar 2006 13:39:39 -0500 Received: from iramx2.ira.uni-karlsruhe.de ([141.3.10.81]:44469 "EHLO iramx2.ira.uni-karlsruhe.de") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751081AbWCOSji (ORCPT ); Wed, 15 Mar 2006 13:39:38 -0500 In-Reply-To: <20060315102522.GA5926@infradead.org> References: <200603131758.k2DHwQM7005618@zach-dev.vmware.com> <1142273346.3023.38.camel@laptopd505.fenrus.org> <4415B857.9010902@vmware.com> <20060315102522.GA5926@infradead.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v749.3) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed Message-Id: Cc: Zachary Amsden , Arjan van de Ven , Linus Torvalds , Linux Kernel Mailing List , Virtualization Mailing List , Xen-devel , Andrew Morton , Dan Hecht , Dan Arai , Anne Holler , Pratap Subrahmanyam , Christopher Li , Chris Wright , Rik Van Riel , Jyothy Reddy , Jack Lo , Kip Macy , Jan Beulich , Ky Srinivasan , Wim Coekaerts , Leendert van Doorn Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Joshua LeVasseur Subject: Re: [RFC, PATCH 0/24] VMI i386 Linux virtualization interface proposal Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 18:38:45 +0100 To: Christoph Hellwig X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.749.3) X-Spam-Score: -4.3 (----) X-Spam-Report: -1.8 ALL_TRUSTED Passed through trusted hosts only via SMTP -2.6 BAYES_00 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 0 to 1% [score: 0.0000] 0.1 AWL AWL: From: address is in the auto white-list Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1713 Lines: 43 On Mar 15, 2006, at 11:25 , Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 10:22:15AM -0800, Zachary Amsden wrote: >>> Why can't vmware use the Xen interface instead? >>> >> >> We could. But it is our opinion that the Xen interface is >> unnecessarily >> complicated, without a clean separation between the layer of >> interaction >> with the hypervisor and the kernel proper. The interface we >> propose we >> believe is more powerful, and more conducive to performance >> optimizations while providing significant advantages - most >> specifically, a single binary image that is properly virtualizable on >> multiple hypervisors and capable of running on native hardware. > > I agree with Zach here, the Xen hypervisor <-> kernel interface is > not very nice. This proposal seems like a step forward althogh it'll > probably need to go through a few iterations. Without and actually > useable opensource hypevisor reference implementation it's totally > unacceptable, though. > As part of our pre-virtualization work, we developed a virtualization solution similar to VMI. We support Xen v2 and v3 with high performance. We added support for the first generation of VMI to our project, and are currently adding support for the latest VMI patch. Our work is open source. We'll announce when we finish the VMI updates. We also experimented with other architectures and found the approach highly suitable, such as for Itanium. Joshua - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/