[Xen-devel] Re: [RFC, PATCH 0/24] VMI i386 Linux virtualization interface proposal

[Joshua LeVasseur <jtl@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> On Mar 13, 2006, at 19:42, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 10:30 -0800, Zachary Amsden wrote:
> >  and gives hypervisors room to grow while maintaining
> > binary compatibility with already released kernels.
> that I buy for binary only hypervisors. But in an open source world  
> I'll
> buy this a LOT less as being relevant.

Binary compatibility to Linux is pretty important for applications.   
Even though Apache is open source, I don't want to recompile it for  
every new Linux kernel.  Fortunately I don't have to, because glibc  
abstracts the Linux kernel interface.  Consider VMI in the same role  
as glibc -- when the hypervisor changes, VMI maintains compatibility  
with your pre-existing infrastructure, while letting you have some of  
the benefits of the new hypervisor.  The upgrade and recompile game  
can quickly end in a stalemate when you have packages with  
conflicting dependencies (one package requires the old version, and  
the other package requires the new version).
Josh


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