Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 3 Jun 2009 01:41:43 +0200 (CEST) | From | Thomas Gleixner <> | Subject | Re: Xen is a feature |
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On Tue, 2 Jun 2009, Steven Rostedt wrote: > If we were to break an interface with Dom0 for Xen then we would have a bunch > of people crying foul about us breaking a defined API. One of Thomas's complaints > (and a valid one) is that once Linux supports an external API it must always > keep it compatible. This will hamper new development in Linux if the APIs are > scattered throughout the kernel without much thought. > > Now here's a crazy solution. Merge the Xen hypervisor into Linux ;-)
Not that crazy as you might think.
> Give full ownership of Xen to the Linux community. One of your people could be > a maintainer. This way the API between Dom0 and the hypervisor would be an internal
s/API/ABI/ :)
> one. If you needed to upgrade Dom0, you also must upgrade the hypervisor, but that > would be fine since the hypervisor would also be in the Kernel proper. > > This may not solve all the issues that the x86 maintainers have with the Dom0 > patches, but it may help solve the API one.
In fact it would resolve the ABI problem once and forever as we could fix hypervisor / dom0 in sync. hypervisor and dom0 need to run in lock-step anyway if you want to make useful progress aside of maintaining versioned interfaces which are known to bloat rapidly.
It's not a big deal to set a flag day which says: update hypervisor and (dom0) kernel in one go.
Thanks,
tglx
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