On 7/16/06, Rusty Russell <rusty at rustcorp.com.au> wrote:
> BTW, re: previous discussion of unified entry point for hypervisors.
> Someone mentioned how difficult it is to share a single entry for native
> and paravirt, and I agree. But it was also mooted that the current Xen
> setup is fine for others to use, too.
>
> AFAICT, the current CONFIG_XEN patches take over startup_32, so native
> can no longer use it; I thought we wanted a single kernel which can boot
> native and paravirt?
I don't think any of our current patches try to support booting the
same image on native and paravirt. But we don't depend on using
startup_32 since our loader will prefer using an alternative entry
point defined in the xen_guest header.
> Hmm, it seems we *could* use startup_32 with %esi == 0 (currently
> impossible?) as a new entry point. The first instruction would be a
> jump if it's zero (which should be OK since segment regs would be fine
> in the case this branch is taken).
This seem unnecessarily complicated, if we agree that we want to make
additional information about the kernel available to the loader
anyway.
christian
