Re: [Xen-devel] mini-guest io emulation

["Jacob Gorm Hansen" <jacobg@xxxxxxx>]

On 3/13/06, Mark Ryden <markryde@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
>  In this occasion, may I ask : what is the puprpse of the mini-os (under 
> extras
> in the Xen tree) ? What is its usages ?
> Can soembody say 3-4 sentences about xen mini-os?

The mini-os (or similar small Xen guests, like my own cstrap), are
useful for stuff like:

1) testing the Xen APIs.
2) as a base on which to implement or port a new Xen guest OS.
3) as a boot loader which can do 'dangerous' stuff such as ELF parsing
from guest rather than dom0 content.
4) for writing small and quickly booting Xen applications. For
instance, I once implemented a slide-show viewer in a Xen VM.

The problem with mini-os-like projects is that they need constant
maintenance to keep up with changes in the Xen API, and that the code
of such projects often becomes a bit unwieldy because a lot of bloat
is often 'faulted in' from Linux in order to make copy-pasted code
such as frontend drivers compile out of their native environment.

Jacob

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