Re: A proposal - binary

From: David Lang
Date: Fri Aug 04 2006 - 15:47:06 EST


On Fri, 4 Aug 2006, Arjan van de Ven wrote:

David Lang wrote:
I'm not commenting on any of the specifics of the interface calls (I trust you guys to make that be sane :-) I'm just responding the the idea that the interface actually needs to be locked down to an ABI as opposed to just source-level compatability.

you are right that the interface to the HV should be stable. But those are going
to be specific to the HV, the paravirt_ops allows the kernel to smoothly deal
with having different HV's.
So in a way it's an API interface to allow the kernel to deal with multiple
different ABIs that exist today and will in the future.

so if I understand this correctly we are saying that a kernel compiled to run on hypervisor A would need to be recompiled to run on hypervisor B, and recompiled again to run on hypervisor C, etc

where A could be bare hardware, B could be Xen 2, C could be Xen 3, D could be vmware, E could be vanilla Linux, etc.

this sounds like something that the distros would not support, they would pick their one hypervisor to support and leave out the others. the big problem with this is that the preferred hypervisor will change over time and people will be left with incompatable choices (or having to compile their own kernels, including having to recompile older kernels to support newer hypervisors)

David Lang


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