Re: [Xen-devel] Drivers

["Charles Coffing" <ccoffing@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Related to this, I wrote a little script that disassembles the kernel and drivers, looking for privileged instructions.  (The "BUG" macro must first be modified to avoid many false positives, however.)

 

It turned up a problem in the file linux-2.6.8.1/drivers/mtd/maps/nettel.c.  I've attached a patch -- can we put this in the patches directory?

 

I also noticed a number of scary things in the kernel itself (moves to/from CR4, various CLI/STI pairs, maybe some others but I forget ATM) but it appears that these are avoided at runtime.  Some of these could and probably should be cleaned up, though, since they exist in the arch/xen tree.  I'll come back with some more details on this.

 

Thanks.

 

>>>Ian Pratt <Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 10/25/04 2:11 pm >>>
>Do we have a list of drivers that have been validated to work in a Xen
>environment. Equally important would be the list of drivers that we know
>have some issues working in a Xen environment.

Pretty much all the drivers built into the current dom0 config
have been booted on some machine and found to work.

There have been some reports of a strange issue involving the
e100 driver and the debian startup scripts, but we haven't
reproduced locally and there seems to be a good workaround. If
someone sends us an oops message its probably trivial to fix.

I've actually been impressed (amazed!) at how few problems we've
found with Linux drivers running over Xen. We're certainly rather
stricter than what's possible to get away with on native x86, but
I guess the ubiquity of PCI has meant that most popular drivers
have been debugged on sparc/alpha/ia64/ppc and have had the bogus
assumptions beaten out of them.

The only hardware drivers known to have problems are agpgart and
drm. The patch directory contains a few patches that fix some
obvious bugs, but more work is required. The xfree86 server VESA
driver doesn't work due to it requiring support for vm86 mode.
Stephan is looking into this.

The other driver that I know we have an issue with is the cisco
linux-iscsi initiator on 2.4. There's a workaround by setting
hacking the driver to set DISABLE_CLUSTERING. The 2.6 iscsi
driver works fine.


Ian



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nettel.patch
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