From: Anthony Liguori <anthony@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:34:21 -0500 > Blue Swirl wrote: > > But I think we could already start early drafting of what KVM support > > for Sparc32 and Sparc64 would mean. Because of certain problems in the > > V9 instruction set design (V8 rett reuse for example), it may be > > difficult or even impossible to use an accelerator if the host and > > target instruction sets do not match. > > I don't know much about the Sparc architecture, but the embedded > PowerPC port that Hollis has spear-headed is for an architecture > that does not natively support hardware virtualization. As long as > Sparc meets all of the requirements to do this sort of > virtualization (all privileged instructions are trappable when run > in non-privileged mode), it should be rather straight forward. As he mentioned, the V8 rett instruction causes problems on V9 chips. An opcode which was a V8 privileged instruction, "rett", got reused as a non-privileged instruction in V9, for "return". So booting a 32-bit kernel on a 64-bit cpu is going to be challenging, at best. > KVM supports x86, ia64, s390, and PPC today. I don't think there > would be any problems adding another architecture support. Almost > all of the abstractions should have been flushed out already by the > previous architecture ports. Moreover, since there is already good > support for Sparc in QEMU, that should simplify things > significantly. Of course. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe sparclinux" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
