On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 5:46 PM, Kevin O'Connor kevin@koconnor.net wrote:
You seem to be suggesting that we could create a bios that just always ran its payload in an emulated machine.
it's a question. The PS/3 and XBOX 360 are proofs of concept.
Anyway for me it's a research avenue we may pursue.
The problem I see with this is that a hypervisor can have significant overhead. (One has to task switch to the hypervisor to do IO.) Also, I doubt everyone will agree on a single hypervisor implementation (kvm, vmware, virtualbox, xen, microsoft's vm, etc.).
There is newer hardware such as Opteron SVM and chipsets with MMUIO allow direct hardware access from a guest.
It is not the case that one must ask the hypervisor to do I/O. More and more frequently, esp. in multicore systems, hypervisors are also used to partition the system, not just time share the CPU. Things are changing rapidly in the hypervisor universe.
thanks
ron