Re: [Xen-devel] Modular Xen

[Keir Fraser <keir@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 15/1/07 17:30, "David Pilger" <pilger.david@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> It seems to me that Xen is full of stuff that aren't beneficial for
> everybody, this includes NUMA, ACM and other stuff that certain
> companies try to introduce... In a better world, the Xen binary would
> have been more sleek and fast, and those extra features should be
> loaded via stating a Module boot line in Grub. This way, testing would
> be easy and it's more elegant than using a compilation flag.
> 
> Are there any thoughts to make Xen more modular in this manner?
> It can be a real improvement for all of us freelancers that experiment
> with this hot subject :)

I personally don't think this is worthwhile, at least right now. The Xen
image is about 1MB in memory (including text, data and bss) which is very
little even for portable devices these days.

If someone is dead set on investigating this then I would also say that it's
rather nice having all of the Xen features in a single binary. One option
might be to place some features into their own sections and free those at
boot time if it turns out a feature is not required for this particular
system or boot configuration. This could be applied for example to Intel-
and AMD-specific code. The cost of having a monolithic Xen image rather than
specifically chosen modules is inconsequential (again, even worst case of an
embedded application consider size of modern flash devices).

 -- Keir


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