RE: [Xen-devel] Software Plugin Interface in Xen hypervisor

[Gianni Tedesco <gianni.tedesco@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2010-10-26 at 17:24 +0100, Nimgaonkar, Satyajeet wrote:
> Hi Gianni,
>               I don't want to emulate devices instead I just want to create a 
> mechanism by modifying Xen hypervisor such that I can plug in any software 
> prototype of an architecture. So basically this mechanism will be a software 
> plug in interface, something like how VTPM is provided in Xen. 
>               I hope this helps you to understand my question.
>               Thanks,

Yes I just didn't know what you meant by "architecture." Basically this
means "emulated devices" afaict? I mean VTPM is just a hardware device
AIUI. What I said before about qemu being the place to implement devices
is not strictly true. Some things, such as APIC's and timers are
implemented in the hypervisor for performance reasons.

You may want to look at arch/x86/hvm/vlapic.c etc. for how this is done
for HVM domains. For PV domains I guess we would just expose the
relevant functionality through the hypercall interface.

There isn't really a "plug in" architecture that lets you swap these
things in and out of the hypervisor at runtime. I think most devs are
just compiling hypervisor and etherbooting it on a separate test machine
with serial console setup.

It really depends on the very specifics of what you are doing but if you
really want rapid dev and testing, I would consider implementing your
devices in qemu.

Gianni


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