Re: [RFC] Unify KVM kernel-space and user-space code into a singleproject

[Ingo Molnar]

* Avi Kivity <avi@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > That is not what i said. I said they are closely related, and where 
> > technologies are closely related, project proximity turns into project 
> > unification at a certain stage.
> 
> I really don't see how.  So what if both qemu and kvm implement an i8254?  
> They can't share any code since the internal APIs are so different. [...]

I wouldnt jump to assumptions there. perf shares some facilities with the 
kernel on the source code level - they can be built both in the kernel and in 
user-space.

But my main thought wasnt even to actually share the implementation - but to 
actually synchronize when a piece of device emulation moves into the kernel. 
It is arguably bad for performance in most cases when Qemu handles a given 
device - so all the common devices should be kernel accelerated.

The version and testing matrix would be simplified significantly as well: as 
kernel and qemu goes hand in hand, they are always on the same version.

> [...] Even worse for the x86 emulator as qemu and kvm are fundamentally 
> different.

So is it your argument that the difference and the duplication in x86 
instruction emulation is a good thing? You said it some time ago that
the kvm x86 emulator was very messy and you wish it was cleaner.

While qemu's is indeed rather different (it's partly a translator/JIT), i'm 
sure the decoder logic could be shared - and qemu has a slow-path 
full-emulation fallback in any case, which is similar to what in-kernel 
emulator does (IIRC ...).

That might have changed meanwhile.

	Ingo
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