RE: [Xen-users] VT-enabled Workstations

["Petersson, Mats" <mats.petersson@xxxxxxx>]

> No, AMD's Pacifica-enabled chips are at least 3 months away.  
> Plus, I'm not sure if Xen's Pacifica support is as good as 
> it's VT support at this point.
> I'm also not sure how different the AMD and Intel 
> virtualization instruction sets are.
> 
> Steve Brueckner, ATC-NY

Xen's SVM (formerly known as Pacifica) support may not be quite there
yet [I don't have a VT box, so I can't really make good comparisons], I
also don't know if the current unstable has the SVM stuff patched in yet
or not. 

As to how different they are, the main difference would be that Intel
and AMD choose different op-codes, that, just to make life interesting,
have slightly different functionality. But the general ideas of how
things work is pretty much the same. Much of the SVM code is near enough
identical, except for the fact that the VMCS/VMCB (Virtual machine
Control Structure/Block) are different, and Intel has a specific
instruction to write to the VMCS, we just use general memory accesses to
get to the VMCB. 

The SVM spec is publicly available here: 
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/
33047.pdf

--
Mats


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