System calls and 64-bit architectures
Posted Dec 20, 2008 11:14 UTC (Sat) by
rwmj (subscriber, #5474)
Parent article:
System calls and 64-bit architectures
This is quite an interesting problem, and one we've also encountered
with virtualization. Paravirtualized guests are a bit like processes, and like
processes they can make hypercalls (which are a bit like system calls).
Where the complexity arises is system administrators want to run
a mixture of 32 bit and 64 bit guests on a system (and on crazy
architectures like IA64, they can even run a mixture of big and little
endian guests). So there's a degree of complexity ensuring the
guests are all passing identical C structs to hypercalls, particularly
in the "32-on-64" case.
Rich.
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