--- "David \"Lefty\" Schlesinger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Miller, Marc wrote:
> > I recently came across an article claiming that virtualization "liberates"
> > the OS from the hardware, basically implying that the hypervisor can now
> > contain all of the drivers and that the OS just needs to have a standard
> > abstraction layer for accessing the true driver involved.
> >
> > Funny, I thought the OS's job was to manage the hardware so that the
> > applications wouldn't have to. It's almost like outsourcing: in DOS,
> > applications had to know what graphics card, printer, mouse, etc. you were
> > using. Linux and Windows standardized this by making device management
> part
> > of its job. (and yes, UNIX already did this) now hardware management is
> > going down another level of the stack.
> >
> I suspect this of being one of those "if all you have is a hammer,
> everything begins to look like a nail" kind of things... Either that, or
> perhaps an effort on someone's part to turn drivers into "SEPs"
> ("Somebody Else's Problem")...
---
The question is, in a hypervisor-based system, what is the OS? I think there's
a reasonable argument that the hypervisor is the OS and those client things
just provide OS-like services to their client applications. From that
viewpoint, it makes sense for the hypervisor to have the privileged
relationship with the hardware and provide an abstraction of the hardware for
the clients to use.
However, in that model I would expect the hypervisor to have an appropriately
light model for devices - just abstracting the privilege model. Much of the
driver would still be in the client OSs, since they would be responsible for
providing services to their clients in turn, mapping the hypervisor device
services into their own abstractions.
Regards,
scott
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