Re: [Xen-devel] How many patches are missing in upstream Linux?

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2014-03-06 at 14:26 -0500, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
> Hadn't looked at:
>  - pvSCSI,
>  - pvUSB
>  - blktap (My recolleciton is that Citrix is just carrying the old
>    patchset around - but the end goal would be for QEMU to do all
>    of this - but they haven't found somebody willing to do a lot
>    of the work in this).

I think Qemu is already a pretty good fit, modulo some vague belief that
blktap's vhd handling might be in some way superior. xl mostly just uses
qemu when blkback isn't appropriate these days.

> The maintainer is being <insert your own opinion here>:
>  - runtime microcode. What I had been told was to use the 'early
>    microcode' mechanism - which is now implemented and Xen can also scan
>    the initramfs to extract the microcode payload and apply it.
> 
>    But it misses the important part of server longevity in that the
>    host might be running for years and the microcode might need to be
>    updated during that time. bpetkov wasn't too thrilled about the
>    runtime microcode and I hadn't come back to this yet to figure out
>    what are his exact technical misgivings.

I have a vague memory of a userspace tool for calling the microcode
hypercalls directly, which might suck from the point of view of needing
to re-integrate with the distros existing use of the regular tools, but
is better than nothing I guess.

Am I totally imagining that tool?

Ian.


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