Re: [Xen-devel] Xen Hypervisor porting on Raspberry Pi 3B+/4

[Roman Shaposhnik <roman@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 4:07 AM Julien Grall <julien.grall@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On 23/07/2019 18:55, Roman Shaposhnik wrote:
> > It would be great to have Xen running on RPi, but I have to wonder: is
> > it now possible to workaround RPi limitations of how GPU boots?
> >     https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=187086#p1206487
> >
> > I thought that this is completely locked, proprietary bcm2837 code
> > that Xen can't do much of anything about.
>
> That's not really a problem. People have managed to get other hypervisor 
> running
> on RPI. The major issue is going to be the interrupt controller, the RPI3 does
> not have a GIC which is a requirement for using Xen.
>
> If you want to get Xen working on RPI3, then you would at least need to 
> provide
> driver for the interrupt controller and emulate it for the guests. 
> Alternatively
> you could provide a PV interface as x86 use to do. Both cases are going to
> require a fair amount of work and very unlikely to be accepted upstream. I 
> would
> like to keep Xen small and simple.
>
> Anyway, Rasberry PI foundation just release RPI4 which now contain a GIC. So
> this should make easier to get Xen working on the platform.
>
> Andre (in CC) has been working on porting Arm Trusted Firmware to the RPI4 and
> manage to get Xen booting up to the stage of bringing-up secondary CPUs (see 
> [1].
>
> I also bought a RPI4 so I will have a go at Xen when I have some spare time.
>
> Cheers,
>
> [1] https://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-users/2019-07/msg00032.html

This is very exciting! Thanks for sharing.

Stefano, is this something on your radar?

Thanks,
Roman.

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