Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:

quoted text
>>>

>> Unless there is a central authority assigning these, "we" can do all

>> we want, enough people will not pay attention.

>>

>> Basically, there needs to be a standards document that describes the

>> architecture, *and* needs to either have universal buy-in with all the

>> vendors or imposed by an authority with enough clout to do so (Intel

>> might.)

>

> I think using fixed offsets is unwise, since there's already contention

> for the same leaves.  Making sure that each block of leaves (where a

> block is 16, 256 or some other number of leaves) is self-describing via

> ABI signatures is the only sane way to go.  There's still the issue of

> assigning ABI signatures to vendors, but that's 1) less of an issue, and

> 2) can be self-assigned with very low likelihood of collision.  That way

> a guest can scan that region of leaf space for ABI signatures it

> understand, and can pick and choose among what it finds (but not mix and

> match - that sounds like a course for disaster).

If you can't mix and match, there is no point, since very likely all

hypervisors will have at least some unique information.
> If we use such a scheme, we can 1) avoid any existing users of that

quoted text
> space, 2) cleanly delimit a hypervisor-agnostic ABI portion of the leaf

> space, and 3) allow hypervisors to implement multiple ABIs at once.

Yes, see my previous "half-baked" sketch.
	-hpa
--

unsubscribe notice
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in

the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org

More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/