On Tue, 29 Nov 2011, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
On Tuesday 29 November 2011, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
Hi all, a few weeks ago I (and a few others) started hacking on a proof-of-concept hypervisor port to Cortex-A15 which uses and requires ARMv7 virtualization extensions. The intention of this work was to find out how to best support ARM v7+ on Xen. See http://old-list-archives.xen.org/archives/html/xen-arm/2011-09/msg00013.html for more details.
I am pleased to announce that significant progress has been made, and that we now have a nascent Xen port for Cortex-A15. The port is based on xen-unstable (HG CS 8d6edc3d26d2) and written from scratch exploiting the latest virtualization, LPAE, GIC and generic timer support in hardware.
Very nice!
Do you have a pointer to the kernel sources for the Linux guest?
We have very few changes to the Linux kernel at the moment (only 3 commits!), just enough to be able to issue hypercalls and start a PV console.
A git branch is available here (not ready for submission):
git://xenbits.xen.org/people/sstabellini/linux-pvhvm.git arm
the branch above is based on git://linux-arm.org/linux-2.6.git arm-lpae, even though guests don't really need lpae support to run on Xen.
Since Xen and KVM are both in an early working state right now, it would be very nice if we could agree on the guest model to make sure that it's always possible to run the same kernel in both (and potentially other future) hypervisors without modifications.
Yes, that would be ideal. We don't plan on making many changes other than enabling PV frontends and backends.