On Thu, 2007-03-08 at 15:39 -0800, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:

Ingo Molnar wrote:

quoted

 - /One/ _intelligent_ higher-level virtualization API/ABI. Xen's API is 
   quite advanced on this front.

At last!  Some love!

The Xen approach has always been to prefer high-level interfaces over
lower-level ones, so that guests can meaningfully participate in their
own virtualization.  There are some necessarily low-level things, but
conceptually simple things like "create a new vcpu" should have simple
interfaces.  There's no point in going to the effort of emulating a
whole pile of real hardware if Xen can present an interface which is a
close match to an existing high-level interface within the operating system.

Once you are there, you are near the point where you created a virtual
architecture, which could run on any real architecture which gets
supported by a hypervisor backend.

I'd love that :)

I know it is tricky to combine this with the upcoming hardware
virtualization support. But it's at least a worthwhile thought
experiment.

	tglx