[OpenAFS-devel] i386_xenlinux26?

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Tuesday, June 28, 2005 12:55:05 AM -0400 Kyle Moffett 
<mrmacman_g4@mac.com> wrote:

> On Jun 27, 2005, at 16:39:03, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
>> Okay, first of all, the xen people need some polite "education"
>> because
>> haveing 'arch/xen' is just a bad idea. What happens if/when xen/
>> x86_64,
>> or xen/PPC64, or xen/ia64 show up? PPC and PPC64 do just fine with
>> with
>> and without the IBM hypervisor and everything coexists nicely.
>>
>> The 'xen' arch is not a new processor, and there is no defensible
>> reason I can think of to add another sysname.
>
> IIRC, at least in terms of the linux source tree, the reasoning behind
> arch/xen was that it was currently quite ugly.  A number of cleanup
> patches are in progress, so relatively soon much of this will be merged
> into the other arch/* trees themselves and the arch/xen directory should
> go away.  I also see no reason to add a xen sysname.

Unfortunately, one of the properties of our current build system is that 
for a different ${ARCH}, you have to have a different sysname.  So our 
choices basically are to do a "port" with a sysname like i386_xenlinux26 
(which would be consistent with how we handled UML), or wait for the 
cleanups of which you speak, and hope the result will be the elimination of 
arch/xen in favor of a config option.

It's worth noting that the approach used by Xen requires an architecture 
with more than two privilege levels, and while i386 and its relatives have 
that feature, relatively few other architectures do.  So, it may be quite 
some time before we see a xen for any other architecture.

-- Jeff