Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>> I think I'd prefer to have the domain builder decompress/relocate the
>> kernel from the bzImage and start it directly, rather than have it
>> decompress/relocate itself, but I'm not really set on that.
>>
>
> We can change a lot more implementation details arbitrarily if you don't
> know what needs to happen for decompression and relocation.
Yes, and if it can be made to work, it ultimately means less work for me ;)
> We have to avoid the writes decompressor-prinnt routines
At worst, we could set up chunk of memory as a dummy framebuffer. That
might be useful for debugging anyway.
> and
> possibly the reload of the segment registers. But otherwise
> we should be fine. I don't see any other privileged instructions
> in arch/i386/boot/compressed/{head.S, misc.c}
>
Xen will start the domain with a GDT loaded, and all the segment
registers loaded with flat segments. I guess boot/compressed/head.S
could do the %cs ring check before deciding to do privileged operations.
I presume bzImage jumps straight to startup_32 on the newly decompressed
kernel?
>> It depends
>> on how well it can deal with having paging enabled and being in ring 1.
>> Looks like it might just be a matter of starting up with "enough" memory
>> mapped.
>>
>
> Yes. I think so. There is an additional issue of exactly how do we
> get the fixmap region allocated so we can use it but that is minor.
>
I haven't checked if it already has this, but it would be nice if the
bzImage had a memory range/list of memory ranges it needs mapped to get
the kernel on its feet, so that the domain builder can just go and map
those areas for it (either P==V mappings, or with a constant offset;
whichever is more useful).
Also, if its a PAE kernel, Xen will start with PAE mode enabled, so
bzImage will have to deal with that. But if its not touching
pagetables, it won't matter.
> What I really want to do is go back to sticking an ELF header on the
> bzImage. We still can't support multiple entry points that way but we
> can include ELF notes fairly easily.
>
That's OK. We'll be able to use the boot info to go into the
Xen-specific path shortly after startup_32 anyway.
BTW, the test for a non-ring 0 %cs won't always be a good test for
paravirtualization; we're likely to start seeing hybrid execution models
where we run a largely paravirtualized kernel in a SVM/VT container. If
we can just unconditionally use the bootloader arch definition to
determine the entry path into the kernel, it will clean things up nicely.
> It looks like for the next version of booting lguest and Xen are
> actually coming closer together again. Yea.
>
> For boot protocol. 2.0.7 We currently need a subarchitecture field (16bits?).
> default == 0, Xen, lguest, voyager?, visws?, numaq?, efi?
>
> We need a subarchitecture data pointer field (32bits).
>
Do we want to support starting a 64-bit guest in 64-bit mode?
> We need to target .23 because it is to late for .22.
Yes. I'll need to do a moderate amount of work on the Xen side to make
this work, I think.
J
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