Re: [Xen-devel] disk throttling

["Mark A. Williamson" <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Has the plan of turning Xen into a next-gen BIOS been scrapped? It seems
> Xen is becoming more and more dependent on having a specific version of
> Linux as dom0?

Our proposed next-gen architecture now consists of:
* Safe Hardware Interface - restricted access to machine resources (memory, IO 
regions...).  Provided by Xen itself.
* Next gen "BIOS controller" - general machine management...  It runs all the 
time rather than just at bootup.
* Driver domains - device drivers scheduled pre-emptively, with restricted 
hardware access
* Virtual machines - run user applications

Currently, the duties of the next gen BIOS controller and driver domains are 
both in dom0 but these functions can be split into separate domains if 
desired.

But both Xen and the dom0 functionality is now notionally part of the 
"BIOS" (obviously you might not want ot use a full featured Linux in dom0 if 
you were really using this as a BIOS!!!) in the model.

It's not clear that the pluggable schedulers framework would give us the 
functionality we'd want anyhow.  If it was useful, it wouldn't make dom0 
dependent on a specific version of Linux - it'd just mean the 2.6 port 
offered more functionality as a dom0.  If it wasn't useful and we rolled our 
own, it may well end up in 2.4 too.

Cheers,
Mark


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