Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

I decided to experiment with the “activity log” format again.

30/10/06 – Spent the day at the Intel Developer Forum in Tel-Aviv. Interesting tidbits: VT-d is going to be shipping in ’07, next generation VT-x will have Extended Page Tables and a tagged TLB. Basically guest page tables will translate from virtual to guest physical and EPT will translate from guest physical to machine addresses. The TLB will include the entire translation (hence the need for a tagged TLB to avoid a TLB flush when doing a VM switch). Didn’t get any hacking done but talked to lots of interesting people.

29/10/06 – Linux: wrote patch for mainline to make it possible to compile Calgary in but not use it (patch is at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/muli/calgary/calgary-choose-to-use). This is mostly for the distros. Xen: got stock xenlinux running on undeg with aic94xx, verified 3com NIC works fine in dom0.

28/10/06 – Debugging Laurent’s Calgary bug (http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7407). Calgary’s BBAR register was getting initialized by the BIOS to a different address than the one we were expecting. Laurent put together a preliminary patch to get the BBAR address from the BIOS supplied tables rather than calculating it directly. This is somewhat problematic as the necessary headers are only defined for i386, whereas Calgary lives in arch/x86_64, so we’ll need to figure out a clean way to use them.