Re: [Xen-users] pv_ops dom0 kernel and VT cpu extensions

[Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik@xxxxxx>]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 11:29:27AM -0500, Gerry Reno wrote:
> Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> >On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 11:24:17AM +0700, Fajar A. Nugraha wrote:
> >  
> >>On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Gerry Reno <greno@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>    
> >>>As physical boxes gain more and more processing capability it makes no 
> >>>sense
> >>>to restrict a physical machine to only a single hypervisor.
> >>>
> >>>Libvirt will support nested VM's that pass through the VT capabilities to
> >>>the next level.  So it makes sense that Xen should be able to do the same
> >>>thing and pass through the cpu VT capabilities to other hypervisors.  Is
> >>>there some law of the universe that prevents this?
> >>>      
> >>While KVM could probably do it, Xen currently can't. You might be able
> >>to get more answers about "why" and possible time line to support it
> >>(if any available) from xen-devel.
> >>
> >>    
> >
> >There was discussion about 'nested virtualization' with Xen at the
> >latest Xen Summit iirc.
> >
> >That still doesn't mean dom0 should have VT visible to it. in Xen world 
> >dom0 is just a PV (paravirtualized) virtual machine guest, 
> >so you can't run KVM in dom0. 
> >
> >If you want to run KVM under Xen HVM guest, then that should be
> >possible when 'nested virtualization' is supported in Xen.
> >
> >-- Pasi
> >  
> Thanks Pasi, that's interesting and I'll try it when it is available.  
> What would be best though is if Xen just passed the VT flags so that you 
> can run KVM in dom0.
> 

There was also talks about converting dom0 to HVM guest instead of PV
guest; that might make it possible to run KVM in dom0.

Nested virtualization with Xen slides:
http://www.xen.org/files/xensummit_intel09/xensummit-nested-virt.pdf

HVM dom0 slides:
http://www.xen.org/files/xensummit_intel09/nakajima.pdf

-- Pasi

> As hardware continues to grow more powerful it won't be long before we 
> see as commonplace 64-core cpu, mult-terabytes of memory.  This will be 
> far more than any one hypervisor/kernel/os needs so we will need a way 
> to boot/run multiple hypervisors on bare-metal.  And that is why some 
> type of agnostic hypervisor-mediator-scheduler needs to run in Ring 0 
> and then all the hypervisors/kernels in Ring 1. 
> 
> -Gerry
> 

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