On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 23:52 +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
> On Tuesday 18 September 2007 23:34, Rusty Russell wrote:
> > How about a "select" based on Xen, lguest or VMI? There's no other
> > reason to enable it, after all.
>
> I did an patch to do that recently because the current setup
> is indeed unobvious.
>
> But I had to drop it again because
> it ended up with Kconfig warnings. about undefined symbols
> on x86-64. The problem is that lguest
> is visible in Kconfig for all architectures and it warns
> if you select something that doesn't exist on all architectures.
I think that's fixed as a side-effect of this cleanup. At least, it
works for me on x86-64. Patch below: if you agree, I'll re-xmit all
three.
> > > Also I would still consider it experimental.
> >
> > After 9 months in mainline and three kernel versions,
>
> Well it changed a lot each release.
Well, the biggest change was the patching code getting enhanced in
2.6.22 (to cover all calls, not just 5). The 22 -> 23 changes were
fairly trivial.
So I think 2.6.24 is a reasonable time to remove EXPERIMENTAL.
> > I'd hope not.
> > It's been pretty damn stable (ok, you broke it once, but maybe that's
> > because you consider it experimental).
>
> Is there a significant user base?
It's enabled in Ubuntu Feisty (2.6.20).
> At least the Xen port seems to have specific requirements
> and essentially only work on xen-unstable (?) [or at least
> some very new Xen version] which probably very few
> people use.
Sure, and that might well still be experimental (Jeremy?). But that's
not CONFIG_PARAVIRT.
Hope that helps,
Rusty.
==
Andi points out that PARAVIRT is an option best selected when needed.
We introduce PARAVIRT_GUEST for the menu itself, and select PARAVIRT
if they ask for anything which needs it. This also makes PARAVIRT
non-experimental.
Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
diff -r 8efa5fdb22d8 arch/i386/Kconfig
--- a/arch/i386/Kconfig Wed Sep 19 11:23:18 2007 +1000
+++ b/arch/i386/Kconfig Wed Sep 19 11:33:59 2007 +1000
@@ -214,24 +214,30 @@ config X86_ES7000
endchoice
-menuconfig PARAVIRT
+config PARAVIRT
+ bool
+ depends on !(X86_VISWS || X86_VOYAGER)
+ help
+ This changes the kernel so it can modify itself when it is run
+ under a hypervisor, potentially improving performance significantly
+ over full virtualization. However, when run without a hypervisor
+ the kernel is theoretically slower and slightly larger.
+
+menuconfig PARAVIRT_GUEST
- bool "Paravirtualized guest support (EXPERIMENTAL)"
- depends on EXPERIMENTAL
+ bool "Paravirtualized guest support"
- depends on !(X86_VISWS || X86_VOYAGER)
- help
- Paravirtualization is a way of running multiple instances of
- Linux on the same machine, under a hypervisor. This option
- changes the kernel so it can modify itself when it is run
- under a hypervisor, improving performance significantly.
- However, when run without a hypervisor the kernel is
- theoretically slower. If in doubt, say N.
-
-if PARAVIRT
+ help
+ Say Y here to get to see options related to running Linux under
+ various hypervisors. This option alone does not add any kernel code.
+
+ If you say N, all options in this submenu will be skipped and
disabled.
+
+if PARAVIRT_GUEST
source "arch/i386/xen/Kconfig"
config VMI
bool "VMI Guest support"
+ select PARAVIRT
help
VMI provides a paravirtualized interface to the VMware ESX server
(it could be used by other hypervisors in theory too, but is not
@@ -239,6 +246,7 @@ config VMI
config LGUEST_GUEST
bool "Lguest guest support"
+ select PARAVIRT
depends on !X86_PAE
help
Lguest is a tiny in-kernel hypervisor. Selecting this will
diff -r 8efa5fdb22d8 arch/i386/xen/Kconfig
--- a/arch/i386/xen/Kconfig Wed Sep 19 11:23:18 2007 +1000
+++ b/arch/i386/xen/Kconfig Wed Sep 19 11:25:07 2007 +1000
@@ -4,6 +4,7 @@
config XEN
bool "Xen guest support"
+ select PARAVIRT
depends on X86_CMPXCHG && X86_TSC && !NEED_MULTIPLE_NODES
help
This is the Linux Xen port. Enabling this will allow the
-
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