[Xen-devel] Re: A proposal - binary

[Rusty Russell <rusty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2006-08-03 at 21:18 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > As far as LKML is concerned, the only interface which matters is the 
> > Linux -> <something> interface, which is defined within the scope of the 
> > Linux development process.  That's what paravirt_ops is intended to be.
> 
> I must confess that I still don't "get" paravirtops.  AFACIT the VMI
> proposal, if it works, will make that whole layer simply go away.  Which
> is attractive.  If it works.

Everywhere in the kernel where we have multiple implementations we want
to select at runtime, we use an ops struct.  Why should the choice of
Xen/VMI/native/other be any different?

Yes, we could force native and Xen to work via VMI, but the result would
be less clear, less maintainable, and gratuitously different from
elsewhere in the kernel.  And, of course, unlike paravirt_ops where we
can change and add ops at any time, we can't similarly change the VMI
interface because it's an ABI (that's the point: the hypervisor can
provide the implementation).

I hope that clarifies,
Rusty.
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