[Xen-devel] Re: Porting Xen...

[Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@xxxxxx>]

> I'm wondering if there is a guide or a general Getting Started for porting
> Xen to different architectures. I'm interested in supporting the arm
> platform.
> 
> Any help or direction is greatly appreciated...

Speaking from experience, I can tell you that porting to a new
architecture is not a small effort.  It is more akin to porting
an operating system than porting an application.  Most of the
code in Xen (x86) is architecture-dependent and, though much of
Xen code is usable for x86_64, it wasn't for ia64 and I'd imagine
arm is very different as well.  Although I was
able to leverage much arch-dep code from Linux/ia64, there
was quite a bit of additional work to handle virtual machine
stuff that is not done by Linux.  Debugging can also be very
difficult unless you have good low-level tools.  (I used a
nice architectural simulator.)  Xen/ia64 has already taken
six months of my time and it is not done.

Is arm fully virtualizable?  Are there any other known VMMs that
run on arm?  If the answer to these is YES, then it might be
easier.

All that said, if you are still interested, I'd be happy to
chat about the Xen/ia64 effort and provide more detail that
might be helpful.

Dan



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