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

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Dec 06, 2019 at 07:08:07PM -0800, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 06, 2019 at 03:26:12PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> > 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.

I guess it basically means you get to put explicit paths to guest
kernels in your Xen configuration files (or I suppose it might be
technically possible to write a grub.cfg by hand and use pygrub).
PV-GRUB is certainly more ergonomic.

> 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).

Hopefully that means somebody from that pool with the requisite skills
will pop up and do the necessary porting work ... if it's anything like
the x86-64 code it should be on the order of a hundred lines of ARM
assembly, but I guess we'll see.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]