vkernel & GSoC, some questions

[Peter Jeremy]

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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