Bug#946240: grub-xen-host: Missing ARM Build

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Dec 06, 2019 at 06:20:36AM -0800, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
> Are you perhaps thinking of the Xen ARM PV project
> (info: https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Archived/Xen_ARM_(PV) )
> and unaware of the Xen ARM with Virtualization
> (info: https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_ARM_with_Virtualization_Extensions)
> project?

Neither.  I'm looking at the current state of GRUB, not of Xen.  Neither
of those Xen projects mentions GRUB at all.

> The former has been deprecated, the latter is very much active and
> apparently usable.  GRUB's support for working with Xen on ARM may merely
> be preliminary, in which case the issue is GRUB.

I can tell you that such support is nonexistent, not merely preliminary
(aside from the ability to boot a hypervisor, as I mentioned; but that's
not what grub-xen-host is about).

> I would expect grub-xen-host to be minimally different between ARM and
> x86.

Much of the support for running in PV mode on x86-based Xen is of course
written as relatively generic C code that ought to be usable on other
architectures, but there are essential pieces (at minimum: startup code,
the hypercall ABI, a relocator, and the build system) that nobody has
yet implemented for Xen on ARM, or if they have then I haven't seen it
and the work doesn't seem to have gone upstream.  I'm sure it would be
welcomed, but it wouldn't be entirely trivial.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]