Re: Where do we stand with the Xen patches?

From: david
Date: Sun May 17 2009 - 15:26:29 EST


On Sun, 17 May 2009, devzero@xxxxxx wrote:

Aside from some whitespace issues around some Impact: lines, I
don't know of any outstanding problems. (I just pushed an updates
to these branches to fix those, and fold a change to address
Jesse's comment.)

Please tell me if you have any further issues which prevents you
from pulling these changes. Otherwise I'd appreciate it if you
pulled them soon, as we're already on -rc5, and I have more
changes I'd like to prep for the next merge window.

As in the past, my main worry is performance overhead of paravirt in
general.

The patches that dont affect any native kernel fast path are
probably OK (but still pending final review).

Regarding patches that do change the fastpath i'll do a round of
measurements of CONFIG_PARAVIRT against !CONFIG_PARAVIRT kernels,
and make up my mind based on that.

You could accelerate this by sending some "perf stat" hard numbers
to give us an idea about where we stand today.

Ingo

maybe this is iust a stupid comment (please forgive, i?m no advanced kernel
hacker), but can?t the code inserted by the patches and which changes the
fastpath just #IFDEF`ed at the critical offsets ? (as building a dom0 kernel is
just another build target, isn`t it ?)

no, if dom0 is going to be widely deployed, it will be because the distros turn on dom0 support by default. as a result any penalties due to xen support will be felt by all users of those distros (even if they don't use xen)

David Lang
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