xen discuss - Jul 2007 - Why is the platform name for the Solaris guest "i86xen" and not "i86pc"?

hi there,

Could someone provide an explanation for the "i86xen" platform name
for the Solaris guest?

tia,
Sherry
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

On 14/07/07, Sherry L. Frasier <sherry.l.frasier@sbcglobal.net>
wrote:
> hi there,
>
> Could someone provide an explanation for the "i86xen" platform
name for the Solaris guest?
Xen guests are Xen aware. You need a custom architecture.

-- 
Rasputin :: Jack of All Trades - Master of Nuns
http://number9.hellooperator.net/

Hi Sherry,
> 
> Could someone provide an explanation for the "i86xen" platform
name for the Solaris guest?
Do you not mean i86xpv? What does ''uname -i'' report? With Xen
there are
now two different platforms on the Intel architecture. These are
"i86pc"
and "i86xpv".  The i86pc architecture refers to Solaris running on
bare
metal, and the i86xpv refers to Solaris running paravirtualized on top 
of the Xen hypervisor.
> 
> tia,
> Sherry
>  
>  

-- 
Best Regards

-Michael
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

On Sat 07/14/07 at 14:28 PM, sherry.l.frasier@sbcglobal.net
wrote:
> hi there,
> 
> Could someone provide an explanation for the "i86xen" platform
name for
> the Solaris guest?
The difference between the system models presented by Xen and by real
hardware are different enough that we decided it made more sense to treat
it as a new platform.  This allows us to make many more decisions at
compile-time rather than run-time, which makes the code simpler, faster,
and easier to maintain.

Since our last OpenSolaris release (which I assume is what you are
running), we changed the name of the platform to i86xpv.

Nils