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

[Elliott Mitchell]

On Fri, Dec 06, 2019 at 03:26:12PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 06, 2019 at 06:20:36AM -0800, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
> > 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).

Yeah, a few minutes of thinking and realized the situation and how silly
I was being thinking this was likely possible out of the box.  Bit of
brain going funky.  %-/

> > 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.

Hrmm.  That is distinctly suboptimal.  This seems like a rather major
weakness for trying to run Xen on ARM.  In other news the
Raspberry PI 4B has hardware which matches the profile for running Xen.
There appears to be a distinct pool of people trying to run Xen on
Raspberry PI devices (I'm not the only one, I think I've got rather more
of a clue than most, doesn't mean I'm anywhere near perfect).


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