Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 0/3] domUloader

[Jeremy Katz <katzj@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 22:31 -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> On a side note, one thing we all have to think about is how a boot 
> loader would work with something like a virtual framebuffer.

Yeah :/

> It may be time to start thinking about writing a first class domU 
> bootloader.  Something that just sets up a page table that maps the pfns 
> linearly and enough XenBus to read from a virtual disk.  We can reuse 
> code from grub for filesystem parsing (or even write it from 
> scratch--it's not that hard to just read from a filesystem).
> 
> We could also use mini-OS as a base.

The problem is where does something like this end?  So we add a basic
blkfront.  Then someone wants to do some form of netboot.  Or boot on
iSCSI.  Or they use something like GFS or OCFS2 which require
significantly more infrastructure than most filesystems.  And then,
there is a world of pain :/

Unfortunately, I am completely convinced that the right thing is to have
the kernel for domU inside the domU's filesystem because anything else
is just fundamentally not manageable.  So, perhaps we do have to just
suck it up and go the path of what's essentially mini-OS as a domU
"bios"

Jeremy


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