adding support for a hypervisor

adding support for a hypervisor

[Chuck Tuffli]

Hi

I work on FreeBSD's hypervisor, bhyve. We have been using a modified
version of grub 2.02 (a.k.a. grub2-bhyve [1]) to load Linux guests
into the virtual machine's memory. Recently, I've needed a more up to
date version of grub with support for things like XFS. Instead of
porting the existing changes to a later version of grub, I wanted to
find out how to approach this such that the changes might be accepted
upstream.

grub2-bhyve leverages grub-emu and adds compile-time #ifdef's to parse
new command line options and do back-end things like create a virtual
machine and map memory. Looking at the documentation, my guess is the
right way to do this is by adding a new platform for bhyve. I started
down this path by following the Porting section of the developer's
manual [2], but am running into issues and wanted to check if this was
the right approach. If so, is the emu platform a good example to
reference, or should I be modeling this after the qemu platform as
bhyve is conceptually similar to qemu?

--chuck

[1] https://github.com/grehan-freebsd/grub2-bhyve
[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub-dev/grub-dev.html#Porting