I'm on travel for a week starting tomorrow.
Will do a bunch of thinking about the best strategies
to use in FreeMWare for our monitor exception handlers
etc. Think in terms of N VMs, each requiring
their own set of device models, handlers etc. So if
we move half the VGA or disk emulation into the monitor
space, each VM needs a copy of the emulation.
Nice job Ulrich on adding multiple VM support to the
Linux kernel driver. That was sweet running multiple
VMs already! I fired up a bunch of programs on the
Linux (host) side and then 2 VMs. Performance was
still reasonable on Linux.
If anyone is looking for some compartmentalized areas
to work on, here's some thoughts:
- Run the same simple code in the VM and outside it. Perhaps
just run the guest/virtcode program. I'd be interested in
knowing the performance ratio, guest-to-host, so we get
a real measurement on how much of a hit we take with
the all the context switch stuff. This is our upper water
mark.
- Documentation again. We need to decide on a set of tools
for our docs, and hopefully get some docs under way. Someone
brought up DocBook. The Linux Documentation Project (LDP) is
using this. Additionally it's one of the formats that O'Reilly
has on its Approved Formats list. (they codeveloped it)
It's a set of SGML tags. There are tools to convert docs
written in it, to HTML, DVI, PDF, PS, and RTF.
I'm putting in my vote for DocBook, since it's what the LDP
team has standardized on. I've never used it before. Seems
like if there was a better set of docs tools that worked well in
a distributed open source development project, LDP would be
using them.
Anyone else? We could accept docs in other formats. All formats
should ultimately be able to generate HTML. So, for instance we
would have a docs/html directory. If we standardized on DocBook
then we'd also have a docs/DocBook dir and a Makefile to generate
files in the docs/html dir. If we had a doc that was in another format,
we could say have a docs/latek dir to. But I think we'd be better
off with one standard.
-Kevin
