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[Xen-devel] Re: A proposal - binary

To: Antonio Vargas <windenntw@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Xen-devel] Re: A proposal - binary
From: David Lang <dlang@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2006 12:06:28 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxx>, zach@xxxxxxxxxx, jeremy@xxxxxxxx, xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, jlo@xxxxxxxxxx, greg@xxxxxxxxx, Rusty Russell <rusty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, hch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, ian.pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, torvalds@xxxxxxxx
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On Fri, 4 Aug 2006, Antonio Vargas wrote:

If there's going to be long-term compatability between different hosts and
guests there need some limits to what can change.

needing to uprev the host when you uprev a guest is acceptable

needing to uprev a guest when you uprev a host is not.

Now, allowing this transparent acting is great since you can run your
normal kernel as-is as a guest. But to get close to 100% speed, what
you do is to rewrite parts of the OS to be aware of the hypervisor,
and stablish a common way to talk.

I understand this, but for example a UML 2.6.10 kernel will continue to run unmodified on top of a 2.6.17 kernel, the ABI used is stable. however if you have a 2.6.10 host with a 2.6.10 UML guest and want to run a 2.6.17 guest you may (but not nessasarily must) have to upgrade the host to 2.6.17 or later.

Thus happens the work with the paravirt-ops. Just like you can use any
filesystem under linux because they have a well-defined intrface to
the rest of the kernel, the paravirt-ops are the way we are wrking to
define an interface so that the rest of the kernel can be ignorant to
whether it's running on the bare metal or as a guest.

Then, if you needed to run say 2.6.19 with hypervisor A-1.0, you just
need to write paravirt-ops which talk and translate between 2.6.19 and
A-1.0. If 5 years later you are still running A-1.0 and want to run a
2.6.28 guest, then you would just need to write the paravirt-ops
between 2.6.28 and A-1.0, with no need to modify the rest of the code
or the hypervisor.

who is going to be writing all these interface layers to connect each kernel version to each hypervisor version. and please note, I am not just considering Xen and vmware as hypervisors, a vanilla linux kernel is the hypervisor for UML. so just stating that the hypervisor maintainers need to do this is implying that the kernel maintainers would be required to do this.

also I'm looking at the more likly case that 5 years from now you may still be runnint 2.6.19, but need to upgrade to hypervisor A-5.8 (to support a different client). you don't want to have to try and recompile the 2.6.19 kernel to keep useing it.

At the moment we only have 1 GPL hypervisor and 1 binary one. Then
maybe it's needed to define if linux should help run under binary
hypervisors, but imagine instead of this one, we had the usual Ghyper
vs Khyper separation. We would prefer to give the same adaptations to
both of them and abstract them away just like we do with filesystems.

you have three hypervisors that I know of. Linux, Xen (multiple versions) , and VMware. each with (mostly) incompatable guests

this basicly boils down to 'once you expose an interface to a user it can't
change', with the interface that's being exposed being the calls that the guest
makes to the host.

Yes, that's the reason some mentioned ppc, sparc, s390... because they
have been doing this longer than us and we could consider adopting
some of their designs (just like we did for POSIX system calls ;)

I'm not commenting on any of the specifics of the interface calls (I trust you guys to make that be sane :-) I'm just responding the the idea that the interface actually needs to be locked down to an ABI as opposed to just source-level compatability.

David Lang

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