Re: [RFC] CPUID usage for interaction between Hypervisors and Linux.

From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge
Date: Tue Oct 07 2008 - 19:46:22 EST


H. Peter Anvin wrote:
And you're absolutely right that the guest may end up picking and choosing different parts of the interfaces. That's how it is supposed to work.

No, that would be a horrible, horrible mistake. There's no sane way to implement that; it would mean that the hypervisor would have to have some kind of state model that incorporates all the ABIs in a consistent way. Any guest using multiple ABIs would effectively end up being dependent on a particular hypervisor via a frankensteinian interface that no other hypervisor would implement in the same way, even if they claim to implement the same set of interfaces.

If the hypervisor just needs to deal with one at a time then it can have relatively simple ABI<->internal state translation.

However, if you have the notion of hypervisor-agnostic or common interfaces, then you can include those as part of the rest of the ABI and make it sane (so Xen+common, hyperv+common, etc).

J
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