Re: [Xen-devel] pvgrub2 for ARM

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2013-11-06 at 14:00 +0100, Vladimir 'Ï-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko
wrote:
> Hello, all. I've ported grub2 to x86_64-xen and i386-xen (PAE only). How
> big is the difference between ARM and i386 when seen as pv guest?

Very. Xen on ARM uses hardware functionality for second stage paging, so
there is far less porting to do.

> I have an ARM here but it's a raspberry pi, so no support for xen. Are there
> machines for under $100 on which xen runs?

The current platforms are listed on
http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_ARM_with_Virtualization_Extensions. The one
which is sub $100 is the Allwinner sunxi based stuff. The native Linux
support is community driven by the linux-sunxi.org folks and is
progressing nicely.

I've got a cubieboard2 (A20 based, <$100) which is a promising platform.
I've mostly been trying to get (native) SATA going, so my Xen
experiments are a bit lightweight, but it does boot. Bamvor has reported
success with using the MMC and documented it on the wiki. I think he's
using an A31 based STB of some sort.

> What's with 64-bit ARM?

TBH I thought the GRuB On ARM stuff was mainly targeting 64-bit (at
least within Linaro). Do you have native grub on 32-bit ARM already
then?

As far as 64-bit hardware goes you will have a struggle finding any at
all right now, nevermind for under $100.

We should at some point be able to support the freely (as in beer)
available Foundation model, but we don't right now.

> Alternatively, I'll probably go for Google HP chromebook 11.

I don;t know about this one, but previous chromebooks have proved a pain
to get Xen onto, too hard to debug anything on them...

> Or may I have access to some server where I'd be able to run VMs with my
> kernel (GRUB) and HDD?

I'm afraid we don't here at least.

Ian.



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