On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 01:16:41PM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote: > This reminds me of XEN. Basically instead of trying to rewrite > instructions or do 100% hardware emulation it sounds like they are > providing XEN-like functionality where the target OS is aware it is > running inside a hypervisor and can make explicit 'shortcut' calls to > the hypervisor instead of attempting to access the resource via > emulated hardware.
That reminds me of IBM VM/CMS: CP (the hypervisor) had a variety of magic "syscalls" (via the DIAGNOSE instruction) that CMS would use to perform (eg) real I/O. > Frankly, I would love to see something like VMWare force an industry-wide > API for machine access which bypasses the holy hell of a mess we have It would need to be open and I can't see any particular driver for VMWare (or anyone else) to force this. > with the BIOS, and see BIOSes then respec to a new far cleaner API. The > BIOS is the stinking pile of horseshit that has held back OS development > for the last 15 years. I'd go further and say that BIOSes are getting worse: Back in the AT-clone days, you could just totally ignore the BIOS once you'd gotten the kernel loaded. Now you _have_ to keep talking to the BIOS for things like ACPI - but the BIOSes are still just as broken as they used to be. -- Peter Jeremy Please excuse any delays as the result of my ISP's inability to implement an MTA that is either RFC2821-compliant or matches their claimed behaviour.
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