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NetBSD Adopts NetBSD/xen for Internal Use

Posted by timothy on from the do-not-take-orally dept.

agent dero writes "With NetBSD 2.0, the NetBSD Foundation also released support for a new port, NetBSD/xen. A version of NetBSD meant to run on top of the Xen virtual machine monitor. In this press release the foundation has announced that it is using the port and Xen for much of its internal development, citing security, and ease of use as main reasons for its adoption."

4 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A Great Leap Backwards by Nimrangul · · Score: 4, Informative

    Looks like you need to read harder: NetBSD/xen can run in both privileged and unprivileged virtual machines under Xen 1.2, and in unprivileged virtual machines under Xen 2.0. Perhaps that is the why of it?

    --
    I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
  2. Re:If only we had the WindowsXP port by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I believe there actually is a windows port, although it might be something earlier than XP. However, you need to jump through some hoops to get educational researcher status (or whatever it's called) from MS.

  3. Re:If only we had the WindowsXP port by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Apart from Zen, would be cool to do a complete replace-boot, as in the OS state is frozen and written to harddisk (some laptop bioses do this), and the state of another OS is read... making switching between OSes, as fast as reading the same amount of data as your used up ram.

    VMWare Workstation (and I assume the rest) can do this. You can also take snapshots, which copy "RAM" and "disk" state to files on the host disk. It seems to only support a single snapshot, but is great for taking a snapshot of a clean system, doing something potentially nasty and then moving back to the snapshot to undo the damage.

    I suppose you could copy the files to keep multiple snapshots, however if they are based on diffs of the current disk image and snapshot image, then that could get tricky depending on which is being updated and which is left static (disk image and disk snapshot). Then again, you could always take a snapshot and keep copies of the various versions of the whole directory for that virtual machine. Assuming you had the space.

  4. Re:Erm by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 3, Informative

    VMWare is a hardware virtualization layer. It exports what appears to be (or damn close to it) a full machine to the OS.
    Xen can be thought of as a micro-micro (nano?) kernel. it exports a minimalist subset, just enough to virtualize the hardware, absolutely nothing more. as such it's not that hard to "port" your OS to run on this kernel, but there is work to be done,