Re: [RFC, PATCH 5/24] i386 Vmi code patching

[Keir Fraser <Keir.Fraser@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

On 23 Mar 2006, at 00:40, Chris Wright wrote:

>> Would you have less trouble if the "ROM" were actually more like a
>> module?  Specifically, if it had a proper elf header and symbol table,
>> used symbols as entry points, and was a GPL interface (so that ROM's 
>> had
>> to be GPL)?  Then it's just a kernel module that's hidden in the 
>> option
>> ROM space and has a C interface.
>
> Yeah, point is the interface is normal C API, and has the similar free
> form that normal kernel API's have.

i think this sounds very sane, and an OS-specific interface shim gets 
around problems such as finding CPU-specific state -- we can get at 
smp_processor_id() just the same as the rest of the kernel, for 
example. We could extend the concept of the interface shim we already 
have -- a set of OS-specific high performance shims, plus a fallback 
OS-agnostic shim.

  -- Keir