OT: Xen

Mon Apr 3 14:00:59 UTC 2006

On Mon, 3 Apr 2006, Chris Adams wrote:

> > Xen is not, however, backed with
> > extensive commercial support (XenSource is still evolving at the moment),
>
> Red Hat has announced that the next rev of their commercial OS offering,
> RHEL 5, will include Xen as a major component.

The point is that decent commercial support is evolving and not quite Here
Right Now.

> > lacks easy integration into popular UI/control-panel products, and requires
> > special kernels for the contained OS's (not such a big deal in practice).
>
> With the right CPUs (late model Intel only at the moment), you can run
> an OS unmodified with a little higher overhead.

It's still some overhead because it's emulating hardware devices, but thanks
to VX, it's not as bad as the classical virtualization trap hacks.  Once AMD
releases their counterpart version of the virtualization extensions en
masse, this will probably get more steam from providers.

If a Xen-instrumented kernel is available for the desired OS, that would
still be preferable, of course.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv at duh.org> <tv at pobox.com> <todd at vierling.name>