Xen High-Performance x86 Virtualization Released

Xen Team writes "The University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory Systems Research Group is pleased to announce the open source release of Xen, a virtual machine monitor for x86. Xen lets you run multiple operating system images at the same time on the same PC hardware, with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Even under the most demanding workloads the performance overhead is just a few percent --- considerably less than alternatives such as VMware Workstation and User Mode Linux. This makes Xen ideal for use in providing secure virtual hosting, or even just for running multiple OSes on a desktop machine."

The Xen team continues: "Xen requires guest operating systems to be ported to run over it. Crucially, only the kernel needs to be ported, and all user-level application binaries and libraries can run unmodified. We have a fully functional port of Linux 2.4.22 running over Xen, and regularly use it for running demanding applications like Apache, PostgreSQL and Mozilla. Any Linux distribution should run unmodified over the ported kernel. With assistance from Microsoft Research, we have a port of Windows XP to Xen nearly complete, and are planning a FreeBSD 4.8 port in the near future.

"Visit the project homepage to find out more, and download the project source code or the XenDemoCD, a bootable 'live iso' image that enables you to play with Xen/Linux 2.4 without needing to install it on your hard drive. The CD also contains full source code, build tools, and benchmarks. Our SOSP paper gives an overview of the design of Xen, and evaluates the performance against other virtualization techniques.

"Work on Xen is supported by UK EPSRC grant GR/S01894, Intel Research Cambridge, and Microsoft Research Cambridge via an Embedded XP IFP award."

Comments

Not really like VMWare

[javatips]

We have a fully functional port of Linux 2.4 running over Xen

With assistance from Microsoft Research, we have a port of Windows XP to Xen nearly complete, and are planning a FreeBSD 4.8 port in the near future (volunteers welcome!).

If one need to port an OS to make it work within Xen, then I will NOT compare it to VMWare. VMare can run your stock OS on a VM whithout the need to tweak it.

The performance advantage it has over VMWare is probably related to that. By having a few restriction on the OS, they can probably offer better performances.

so its just an extra layer of abstraction?

[ikoleverhate]

So really, this is just an abstraction layer that means even the OS is unaware it's sharing hardware, so in theory theres no way for a malicious user to take advantage of other users. Pretty cool in a boring and limited sort of way. Kudos to the team who did it, I'm sure it's a real technological challenge. Not what the /. headline promised though ;)

Re:MOL for x86?

[tgd]

This would not allow you to run Windows under Linux... it would allow you to run Windows and Linux under Xen, which is not nearly the same thing.

Contrary to the submitter's comments, this product is nothing like VMWare.