From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1757065AbYETEFT (ORCPT ); Tue, 20 May 2008 00:05:19 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1750994AbYETEFF (ORCPT ); Tue, 20 May 2008 00:05:05 -0400 Received: from main.gmane.org ([80.91.229.2]:50783 "EHLO ciao.gmane.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750976AbYETEFE (ORCPT ); Tue, 20 May 2008 00:05:04 -0400 X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org From: John R Moser Subject: UML and VMI ... how does UML work? Date: Mon, 19 May 2008 23:58:40 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org X-Gmane-NNTP-Posting-Host: main.gmane.org User-Agent: Loom/3.14 (http://gmane.org/) X-Loom-IP: 199.173.224.31 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008032620 Firefox/3.0b5) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org I've been googling around but can't find a good resource for technically how UML works. I'm thinking about specifically the task of implementing a virtualization platform without kernel hooks... this lead me to dancing around checking out existing technology and noticing claims that UML can run on an unmodified kernel without special needs. In short, I'm curious about how UML works because I'm interested in knowing if it's theoretically possible to remove the UML code (i.e. compile it out) and then boot a kernel within an application that gives it a VMI structure to ... act exactly as UML. I know, it's probably really hard to have an application with no kernel assistance actually load a kernel and expose a VMI API to it in the first place; I'm not interested in X can't happen because Y can't happen, I'm just interested in understanding the field.