Re: [Xen-devel] Questioning the Xen Design of the VMM

[Al Boldi <a1426z@xxxxxxxxx>]

Petersson, Mats wrote:
> Al Boldi wrote:
> > I hoped Xen would be a bit more
> > transparent, by simply exposing native hw tunneled thru some
> > multiplexed Xen patched host-kernel driver.
>
> On the other hand, to reduce the size of the actual hypervisor (VMM),
> the approach of Xen is to use Linux as a driver-domain (commonly
> combined as the management "domain" of Dom0). This means that Xen
> hypervisor itself can be driver-less, but of course also relies on
> having another OS on top of itself to make up for this. Currently Linux
> is the only available option for a driver-domain, but there's nothing in
> the interface between Xen and the driver domain that says it HAS to be
> so - it's just much easier to do with a well-known, open-source,
> driver-rich kernel, than with a closed-source or driver-poor kernel...

Ok, you are probably describing the state of the host-kernel, which I agree 
needs to be patched for performance reasons.

> > I maybe missing something, but why should the Xen-design
> > require the guest to be patched?
>
> There are two flavours of Xen guests:
> Para-virtual guests. Those are patched kernels, and have (in past
> versions of Xen) been implemented for Linux 2.4, Linux 2.6, Windows,
> <some version of>BSD and perhaps other versions that I don't know of.
> Current Xen is "Linux only" supplied with the Xen kernel. Other kernels
> are being worked on.

This is the part I am questioning.

> HVM guests. These are fully virtualized guests, where the guest contains
> the same binary as you would use on a non-virtual system. You can run
> Windows or Linux, or most other OS's on this. It does require "new"
> hardware that has virtualization support in hardware (AMD's AMDV (SVM)
> or Intel VT) to use this flavour of guest though, so the older model is
> still maintained.

So HVM solves the problem, but why can't this layer be implemented in 
software?

I'm sure there can't be a performance issue, as this virtualization doesn't 
occur on the physical resource level, but is (should be) rather implemented 
as some sort of a multiplexed routing algorithm, I think :)

> I hope this is of use to you.
> 
> Please feel free to ask any further questions...

Thanks a lot for your detailed response!

--
Al


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