* Chris Wright <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > ok, sure, how about the one i mentioned: long-term i'd like to have
> > a paravirt model where the guest does not store /any/ page tables -
> > all paging is managed by the hypervisor. The guest has a vma tree,
> > but otherwise it does not process pagefaults, has no concept of a
> > pte (if in paravirt mode), has no concept of kernel page tables
> > either: there are hypercalls to allocate/free guest-kernel memory,
> > etc. This needs some (serious) MM surgery but it's doable and it's
> > interesting as well. How would you map this to the VMI backend?
>
> Sounds a lot like a userspace process. My immediate thought is, why
> not use containers, a more natural fit. [...]
easy: in my model the hypervisor is isolated from the guest kernel. In
the container model it is not. [ This is a basic quality requirement for
virtualization: a guest kernel does not get to read any hypervisor
crypto keys to HD-DVD smut! ;-) ]
> [...] But if you have _any_ hope of booting this kernel on native
> hardware when it's not running under a hypervisor then I'd expect the
> same pv_ops interfaces that allow it to run on native would allow VMI
> to build and handle the shadow (since you'd have taken it out of the
> kernel). Heh, so in order to run this on native we had to add
> fork/mmap pv ops? I agree it might be interesting, but it's still not
> clear that it's useful w/out some code to back it up, and see the
> value.
progress ;-) But yes, some /really/ high-level pv_ops would be needed.
[ in the end we might be able to simplify it down to a single hook! That
would be: run_native_image / run_guest_image ;-) ]
seriously, most of the body of x86 kernel code is in filesystems, VFS,
networking, scheduler and the core kernel - much of which can be shared
between native and guest. The MM is a significant and very central
chunk, but it is less than 3% of the total codesize.
Ingo
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