On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 07:39 +0200, Andi Kleen wrote: > On Monday 07 August 2006 06:47, Rusty Russell wrote: > > This patch does the dumbest possible replacement of paravirtualized > > instructions: calls through a "paravirt_ops" structure. Currently > > these are function implementations of native hardware: hypervisors > > will override the ops structure with their own variants. > > You should call it HAL - that would make it clearer what it is. People get visions of grandeur when HAL is mentioned: they think it'll abstract everything. I really only want to do the minimum needed for the hypervisors we have on the table today. Maybe one day it will abstract everything, then we can call it a HAL. But I won't be doing that work 8) > I think I would prefer to patch always. Is there a particular > reason you can't do that? We could patch all the indirect calls into direct calls, but I don't think it's worth bothering: most simply don't matter. The implementation ensures that someone can get boot on a new hypervisor by populating the ops struct. Later they can go back and implement the patching stuff. > It would be better to merge this with the existing LOCK prefix patching > or perhaps the normal alternative() patcher (is there any particular > reason you can't use it?) > > Three alternative patching mechanisms just seems to be too many Each backend wants a different patch, so alternative() doesn't cut it. We could look at generalizing alternative() I guess, but it works fine so I didn't want to touch it. Rusty. -- Help! Save Australia from the worst of the DMCA: http://linux.org.au/law
