Appendix. PV Guest Porting Cheat Sheet

Porting an operating system to Xen is very similar to porting it to any other new platform. If the system already runs on x86, the number of required changes is relatively small compared to porting to a completely new architecture. At the simplest level, you do not need to switch to a new compiler, because your current one must already be able to generate x86 binaries. You also do not need to worry about alignment or endian issues, because these are exactly the same for native and paravirtualized x86.

Most of the changes are likely to be at the lowest level. If, like NetBSD, you already have an abstraction layer for things like interrupts and memory management, you only need to modify the abstraction layer ...

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