On 15 May 00 at 12:05, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> On Mon, 15 May 2000, Petr Vandrovec wrote:
> > Hi Ingo,
> > was there good reason for moving software IPI calls from
> > vectors 0x30/0x40/0x41 to 0xfd/0xfc/0xfb ? It brokes again
> yep, TLB-flush wants to have low latency.
Fine. I have reason :-)
> But frankly, as far
> as i see it VMWare does not care too much about Linux (otherwise
> we'd see contributions from them), so why should Linux care
> about VMWare?
Unfortunately, I have no idea what VMware can offer to community
(except that I can work on ncpfs and matroxfb because of they pay me
for doing 2.3.x kernel support (of course (just in case someone
from cvut.cz reads it) I must also note that cvut.cz pays me too)).
If you have an idea what can be done (except putting VMware into GPL - it
is very nice idea, but...)...
> > VMware vmmon/vmnet (like every previous 2.3.99-preX did... are we
> > really in any freeze?!), finaly moving it into state where
> > it is not possible to fix it in vmmon code and change to VMware's
> > non-GPLed code is required :-( [...]
> (as you probably know, they could get the fixes for free if they put those
> parts under the GPL and if they'd work a bit on integrating the kernel
> part of their virtual-PC framework into the Linux kernel.)
It is problem where to drawn line what is kernel and what is not.
VMM itself is pretty big chunk of code (due to CPL0 virtualization, I think)
and its integration into kernel is questionable (not counting possible
patent problems [but I did not saw VMM sources, so I cannot tell this
for sure]). Currently kernel vmmon module only offers allocation memory
and switching to CPL0 - something like old DOS/EMM386 VCPI interface did.
vmnet of course offers complete virtual network interface, but I think that
you can build something simillar with ethertap/dummy/<yet to written
userspace program> too, so I do not know whether I should try to push on
release of vmnet-bridge/vmnet-netifup into GPL and integrating vmnet into
Linus's kernel. Maybe userspace linux could use vmnet interface for
ethernet card emulation, but I did not looked into userspace linux yet.
Best regards,
Petr Vandrovec
vandrove@vc.cvut.cz
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