On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 6:06 PM, David Miller <davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Instead I would rather you look into a model like what the quake > engine uses for it's VM. Thanks for the tip! I wasn't aware of quake vm. I've looked through several papers and slides. I'm surely missing something in what they're doing, but here is my comparison of eBPF vs QVM: - QVM ISA is stack based vs eBPF registers - pointer types are predefined by QVM ISA whereas eBPF relies on static verifier which is more extensible, since verifier can get progressively smarter with time without need to change interpreter, llvm and JITs, whereas QVM would need changes through the toolchain, interpreter, JITs to support new pointer type - QVM calls with negative values invoke helper functions, which is similar to eBPF calls. The difference is QVM keeps negative values while interpreting and doing run-time checking of arguments whereas eBPF is statically verifying all before interpreting - access to QVM 'local' memory is bounds checked at run-time, whereas eBPF does load/store bounds checking by static analysis I may be wrong, but it seems possible to side step QVM run-time checking, since their 'top of stack' is typeless and it seems possible to push constant as a pointer there. I'm biased, but eBPF seems like better architecture, more flexible, likely faster to interpret, simple JITs, more powerful compiler. The downside, of course, eBPF verifier is more complex than QVM which is mainly relying on run-time checks. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
