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Re: Device model architecture (Was Re: [Xen-devel] Re: Are linkerscripts needed?)



Ian Pratt wrote:
> > When switching between the vmcs guest and the minios, we
just need to
switch new values into the guest_table variable and the shadow_mode variable and then all the Xen logic will do the right

thing. (no cr3
flush in incurred)

I guess the main logic behind your argument is that there is no need to fully virtualize the device models, so no need to run them within a non-root VMCS.


We can't run them in the same non-root VMCS as the guest since we need
some virtual address space. Since the hardware does a cr3 switch to the
monitor_table when doing a vmexit, wwe might as well make better use of
this and treat the device models as just another paravirtualized guest.

I thought some more about this. We can't think of device models as a bunch of code that run only during a vmexit. It needs to be able to handle asynchronous events such as keyboard/mouse input or other sources of events and inject interrupts into the VMX domain ASAP.

Specifically, on a dual CPU system or a HT system, we should be able to run device models on one CPU and the VMX domains on another CPU. This is possible in the current design.

        -Arun

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