Slashdot Mirror
Novell To Ship Xen in Next Version of Suse
daria42 writes "The next version of SuSE, to be shipped in mid-April, will ship with the Xen virtualization software, letting users run multiple versions of the operating system simultaneously, the company said on Thursday. The article says that Red Hat has also begun adding Xen support to Fedora."
It has only technical reasons, that windows is not supported. From the Xen FAQ ( http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/faq .html#a1.4):
Unfortunately we do not currently support Windows; the paravirtualized approach we use to get such high performance has not been usable directly for Windows to date. However recently announced hardware support from Intel and AMD will allow us to transparently support Windows XP & 2003 Server in the near future. We are working on this and intend to have support available by the time the new processors are available.
Parent post is pure, unadulterated bullshit.
You don't install Wine into a virtual machine any more than you install Office or HalfLife into a virtual machine.
You install an OPERATING SYSTEM into a virtual machine, then you install applications on that OS.
Wine is an application, no different than OpenOffice. It uses the services of the underlying operating system to do its job. The fact that its job is to provide the APIs of a foreign operating system is incidental.
So, all that running Xen would do is to allow you to have an install of Linux or *BSD solely to run Wine - which would provide no real benefit to running Wine.
The only way in which Xen would be of use in running Windows programs would be if Windows ran under Xen - which last time I checked it DOES NOT.
The poster of the parent post is just trolling for stupid moderators, and obviously has already found at least one.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Xen can be significantly faster due to the difference in how it works.
UML is a port of the kernel to a "POSIX architecture" so that it runs in userspace.
Xen is a port of the kernel to a quasi-x86 architecture (basically x86 with some non-virtualizable instructions removed). This means that most of the time Xen is running directly on the hardware.
I have. I have a single computer acting as my local home server (a p3-500 with 512mb ram). This machine acts as a linux desktop, development machine, it handles my mail and web stuff, and it acts as a shells-server sandbox for a friend who uses it to test his code on. Some of these things are mutually exclusive (I like to run debian stable for mail+web, while my development stuff is bleeding edge). Also, it is handy for said friend to have root access in order to be able to install needed packages. With a VM he can have a sandbox to freely play around in without having it affect my system in any way.
As a result, i have a base system for my desktop (currently running Ubuntu Hoary), and on top of that are 3 VM's: one for mail, one for web, one for shells. The filesystems are stored in containerfiles, so they are very easy to backup. Until a couple of months ago I used User Mode Linux for these VM's, but UML development doesn't seem to progress very much and performance wasn't optimal, to say the least. Because of this, I switched to Xen and I've been very happy with the results. Setting is very easy. Compared to UML, Xen is _much_ faster. I haven't noticed any overhead from Xen, both the host system and the individual VM's seem to operate at native or near native speed, while UML (even with skas etc) took a very noticable performance hit. Development seems very active, tracking the newest kernels. Also, the management tools are really nice. Setup of the network was much easier for me than with UML, every VM automatically creates ports for the console, and there's is additional web management that makes managing the VM's really friendly. All in all, if you have any interest in playing with this stuff, I would very much recommend Xen.
Xen is going to be a much better performer than UML. However, if you need maximum performance and are OK with running only one operating system (Linux), consider Linux VServer. It gives you most of the functionality of "virtualization" (even though it's not true virtualization since there is only _one_ kernel running on the machine) - a complete "virtual server" appearance with essentially no overhead.
There are numerous advantages to the VServer approach (a.k.a. as Zones on Solaris and Jails on FreeBSD, BTW), such as the ability to access the filesystem from host (very useful for backups), ability to view/control the virtual server processes from host, single VM and IO across all virtual servers thus providing much better optimization. The performance is stunning - you just don't feel "virtualized".
Linux VServer isn't backed by major universities and Microsoft Research and thus unfortunately does not get the publicity, even though it is one of the most revolutionary projects out there IMHO. I hope it becomes part of vanilla kernel some time soon.
Well, microsoft research originally sponsored xen development, and did port a version of XP.. However it's not available to the general public, not even to people who legitimately have copies of xp already.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Well, because it's fast for one thing.
Life is about tradeoffs. One of the biggest things you give away trying to create a virutal server is speed. Xen's advantage is that it is more efficient.
Suppose I want to run a name server and a database server, and I only have one physical box to do it on. In a sense, running them on the same machine introduces a kind of coupling. If BIND turns out to have a remote root vulnerability, my database is toast. I'd consider running under vmware, but the performance hit is big enough that I'd probably decide to live with the potential problem.
I can imagine in the future a distro in which a separate virtual machines is used when the user decides to browse the internet or read email, provided the overhead was small. When his browser machine is rooted by spyware, they can enjoy looking at his bookmarks, because that's all they're getting. If the user screws up and installs a trojan popup extension, he can throw the entire virtual machine away and get a new one off the shelf.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.