Re: [Xen-users] Xen and PPC and ARM

[Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi there,

> Please tell me what hardware platforms is supported
> by Xen except i386 and IA64,
> and what is the amount of the support?

Don't forget x86_64, which I think is fairly well supported.

> I mean is absent, partial, experimental or full.
>
> My interest is about the architectures:
> * PPC

There's code for Xen on PPC in the tree.  Last I heard, it was not production 
ready yet.  I don't think I've seen much from the IBM developers who were 
working on this for a while, so I'm not sure what the status of the work is.

> * ARM

 There are some developers working on this; I believe they're working on Xen 
for deployment on Smart Phones, etc.  See:

http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2007-08/msg00428.html
http://xen.xensource.com/files/xensummit_4/Secure_Xen_ARM_xen-summit-04_07_Suh.pdf
http://xen.org/files/xensummit_fall07/14_SangBumSuh.pdf

These are just some random links I thought might help.  There may be others 
out there you'd find worth reading.

> As far as I know there no more architectures
> supported by Xen (or even planned to support).

Not that I know of; I've heard the idea of a MIPS port mentioned but I've no 
idea if that will ever be tackled by anyone.

> And question #2.
> Theoretical.
>
> Will recursive virtualization be possible in Xen
> in future or it's more likely that some new
> virtualization systems will emerge that will
> be able to virtualize recursively?

You can get one step towards nesting Xens by running Xen + PV domains in a Xen 
HVM domain.

It will never be possible nest Xen instances using pure PV, you'd need HVM 
support.

Arbitrary nesting of Xens could be implemented using HVM if each "host" Xen 
emulates the behaviour of the HVM instructions for its "guest" Xen instance.  
This emulation code has not been implemented to date and I've not seen any 
suggestion that somebody is working on it.  But it is theoretically possible 
(might perform really badly, though futurehardware support could reduce the 
overhead a bit).

You can nest QEmu virtual machines already but the acceleration options 
mightn't work, I guess, so it would probably be pure emulation.

Cheers,
Mark

-- 
Push Me Pull You - Distributed SCM tool (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~maw48/pmpu/)

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