[linux-elitists] Virtualization

[Adam Sampson]

"J. Paul Reed" <preed@sigkill.com> writes:

> That's actually one reason I dislike Xen; their technology is mostly
> useless, because they "cheat" by modifying the operating system to
> make it play well in a VM (hence, no Windows support).
> It's a valid design decision, but it relegates the app to "Wow. This
> is nice for running multiple copies of... Linux. I could do that
> with UML."

They've apparently got Windows ported to it; they just can't release
it owing to the license. They've got NetBSD too.

The research group I'm in is currently looking at Xen because it
should make a pretty nice environment for developing an OS: it
provides standard virtual devices, so we can just write one set of
network/video/disk drivers and still get reasonable performance, and
we can run it at effectively native speed alongside Linux on our
cluster nodes.

They've got some cool-looking image migration stuff too (a colleague
described moving a Linux system playing video between PCs without
noticable interruption). Yes, it's definitely cheating, but it's
pretty non-intrusive cheating, and the result is actually useful...

-- 
Adam Sampson <azz@us-lot.org>                        <http://offog.org/>