Re: Port DragonFly to Xen platform

[Aggelos Economopoulos <aoiko@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Alex Hornung wrote:
> : As a side effect of this, will interrupt routing need to be fixed? 
> 
> I don't see how this has anything to do with a Xen port. Our interrupt
> routing is not broken but rather outdated. We still rely on the mptable
> instead of doing ACPI interrupt routing (and we also lack MSI support), but
> that's a different issue, unless Xen *requires* MSI, which I doubt.
> 
> 
> : Also, I am looking at doing the NUMA project (investigation stage) so
> : that could work with a Xen port nicely.
> : I, myself look forward to a Xen port !
> 
> While I see the point of a Xen port, I'm starting to think that something
> along the lines of KVM or hardware virtualization support for vkernels might
> be more interesting and relevant.

Indeed. Now would be a good time to discuss that approach as well.
AFAIK, Xen has a history of difficult to maintain code (according to a
lot of the linux developers at least), while kvm is conceptually much
simpler and, like Alex and others have suggested, it is close to our
existing vmspace code.

What kind of changes would you have to make to our core kernel code for
Xen support?

Aggelos