what we do _NOT_ want is some mixture of 'simplified' and 'hardwired' 
native hardware access mixed with hypercalls that somehow ends up 
creating a Frankenstein mixture of 'virtual silicon', is specified 
nowhere else but in VMWare's proprietary hypervisor source code that we 
have no way to fix and no way to even see!

Hmm, but we already drive the "vmware silicon" quite successfully with
fully virtualized kernels. And apparently the VMI version is the same,
just with some short cuts. Are you just worried about the ->apic_write()
hooks or about something else too?

-Andi