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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."

45 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why? by justkarl · · Score: 3, Funny

    Simple question. ("normal users").

    Sorry, who?

  2. What about UML? by Mad+Merlin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How does Xen compare to User Mode Linux? They appear to scratch a similar itch, but has anyone tried out both to compare?

    1. Re:What about UML? by Chirs · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:What about UML? by vulcan_pupil · · Score: 3, Informative

      Xen outperforms UML. At least on applications that heavily work the OS.

    3. Re:What about UML? by vertigo · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:What about UML? by gtrubetskoy · · Score: 5, Informative
      How does Xen compare to User Mode Linux?

      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.

    5. Re:What about UML? by Alioth · · Score: 2, Informative

      See one of my recent journal entries.

      For my uses for my Internet server, Xen has proven an _order of magnitude_ better performing than UML, although there were some other changes that helped (going from file-backed filesystems to partitions for each Xen domain). But even without that, in practise, in most every day loads, the performance overhead of Xen compared to native is only around 2%, where the overhead of UML+skas3 is greater than 50%.

      The Xen website has a performance comparison which has been independently verified. Xen has also been compared against IBM's mainframe virtualization.

  3. Good Idea! by elemur · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The virtualization software makes it much easier to build task-focused servers, helping add more security to your environment... with very low overhead.

    Has anybody done a 1-to-1 comparison between Solaris Zones and the features that Xen provides? The Solaris setup is really very easy.. you can have a custom environment booted and running in a few minutes..

    I will say that Xen is impressive, given its benchmarks posted.. it shows a very efficient virtualization engine.

    1. Re:Good Idea! by nathanh · · Score: 2, Informative
      Has anybody done a 1-to-1 comparison between Solaris Zones and the features that Xen provides?

      They're completely different technologies. Short summary: Xen is para-virtualisation, Zones are a kernel abstraction.

      With Solaris zones there is a single kernel. The process structure has been extended with a zone ID, so the kernel knows which zone each process belongs to. Solaris boots normally and becomes the master. Then each slave zone boots inside the master. Zone filesystems are simply subdirectories of the real filesystem. Zones are extremely fast and efficient.

      With Xen there are multiple kernels running in "domains". Xen boots first and then launches the kernels of each domain. The Xen VMM manages memory and CPU. Xen provides "virtual hardware" for network and disk but the driver is actually in domain 0. Each kernel has its own filesystem. Often those filesystem are provided by really big files residing on a real filesystem from domain 0, though you can also assign partitions or logical volumes to each domain.

      One of the benefits of Xen's approach is that you can run different versions of the kernel and even completely different kernels (eg, BSD and Linux) side-by-side. With zones you are always running the same Solaris 10 kernel on all zones. However this means Xen isn't as efficient as zones due to wasted resources and hardware contention from multiple kernels. Xen requires extensive modifications to the boot sequence, modifications to the guest kernel, and changes in the way you maintain the server. Zones don't affect you until you need to use them, and when you go to use them you don't need to change the boot sequence or how you maintain the server. Because Xen sits on top of the hardware, you lose features like ACPI and APM until Xen has support for those features. Xen also makes debugging a kernel problem far more complicated.

      I personally don't see the benefit of Xen over something like Plex86. Roughly speaking, Plex86 placed the VMM component of Xen inside the Linux kernel. So a standard Plex86/Linux kernel is both the Xen VMM and the domain 0 kernel. Though Xen and Plex86 don't share code; I'm just using those names to link the parallel concepts. This makes everything a lot simpler in Plex86; the host kernel has full hardware access and in most ways is completely normal. It's only guest kernels that need anything special. Xen has gone to a lot of trouble to keep the VMM separate from the kernel, but at the expense of adding considerable complexity.

  4. Without Windows, not too helpful... by datastalker · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Of course, I understand the licensing and freedom restrictions about using Windows under such a program, but without being able to use Windows with it, I'm gonna have to stick with VMware.

    I can see the uses for it, but right now, those don't align with what I need, and I suspect that will hold true for many others as well.

    Even still, it's cool technology.

    1. Re:Without Windows, not too helpful... by saintp · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I almost wonder if this isn't so much an effort to compete with VMware or Wine or whatever, but rather an effort to compete with Sun's N1 Grid computing. Sun boasts a lot about running different apps in different containers, etc., which is something Jonathan Schwartz likes to claim Linux can't do. It appears that now SuSE (and soon Fedora) *can* do that out of the box.

    2. Re:Without Windows, not too helpful... by rca66 · · Score: 5, Informative
      Of course, I understand the licensing and freedom restrictions about using Windows under such a program,

      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.

    3. Re:Without Windows, not too helpful... by badfish99 · · Score: 2, Informative
      But they also state elsewhere in their documentation, that operating systems must be ported to run on Xen. Obviously this would be impossible to achieve with Windows, as the source code is not available.

      If I understand it correctly, the big problem is that the X86 architecture was designed without this sort of thing in mind, so it is difficult to get it to work well without making changes to the operating system. The new 64-bit architecture addresses this limitation.

    4. Re:Without Windows, not too helpful... by Bert64 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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!
    5. Re:Without Windows, not too helpful... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's complimentary to this. In terms of Grid computing the ability to run jobs in sandboxed containers that exist only for the life of the job and may be a bespoke version of an OS (different OS, different libraries, etc., etc) is exactly what is needed. Lots of work is going on in this area, and VMWare, User Mode Linux, and Solaris containers are all tools which allow this to be implemented.

      Of course you could argue that you could just run Solaris x86 and then use containers to host an instance of another OS, and on that basis Xen is superfluous, but a (small) number of competing options is not necessarily a bad thing. (Lots of forks and reinventions of the wheel are bad things).

      Wine isn't an implementation of this concept, although Wine running inside a virtual server would be an implementation that might allow Windows programs to run.

      The issues with some of these approaches (notably VMWare and to a certain extent User Mode Linux) has been the performance hit that applications take when running inside the virtualised servers. If Xen addresses some of these issues then it is a welcome development for those of us working on Grid infrastructures.

      What Xen doesn't do, though, is run on non-x86 machines. So if you have a power pc cluster running Linux, you can't use Xen, but only User Mode Linux.

  5. Re:One of the benefits of xen by Mad+Merlin · · Score: 5, Insightful
    one of the things that xen does also help is running WINE so much better. You might get some incompatibility problems but generally it's much better.

    Also, combined with other code like emulators it can even go further than just virtualizing x86 software.

    How exactly does Linux in a VM run Wine better than Linux not in a VM?

  6. Re:Why? by dtfinch · · Score: 2, Funny

    You take 10 machines. Install 10 copies of Linux or NetBSD on each, using Xen to run them simultaneously. Then you make 10 beowulf clusters out of it.

  7. LOL? I want WOL. by Quixote · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Linux-on-Linux (or, for that matter, Unix-on-Linux) is interesting in its own right (think shared hosting), but I want Windows-on-Linux for the occasional Windows app, as well as to just play around.

    It is interesting to see that Microsoft earlier supported Xen, but then later pulled support. Their (Xen's) homepage still mentions having received support from Microsoft Research.

    --
    Does MSN censor search results?

    1. Re:LOL? I want WOL. by stevey · · Score: 2, Informative

      Windows on Linux is here already thanks to Qemu.

      I wrote a simple guide to Running Windows inside Debian a while back which seems fairly popular.

      The big difference with Zen is that it requires the operating systems it runs to be modified, whereas Qemu will run any native operating system, Linux, Windows, *BSD, Knoppix, etc without change.

      That to me makes it more useful.

  8. Bullshit warning by wowbagger · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Bullshit warning by wowbagger · · Score: 2, Informative
      Which could be done far more easily by:
      1. Creating a dedicated Wine user and running all Wine apps as that user
      2. Properly securing your base system (e.g. making sure all system directories are writable only by root, and not running as root.
      3. chroot'ing the Wine install.
      4. Configuring SELinux security tags to restrict Wine apps.


      None of which have anything to do with the blitherings of this troll.

      The sad thing is that some of this moron's follow-ups are still at +3, and that no matter what, the moron moderators who gave him positive points will, in all likelyhood, be metamoderated as "fair".
  9. Re:How's this different? by PornMaster · · Score: 3, Funny

    It starts with an X, which makes it inherently cooler.

  10. Re:One of the benefits of xen by Wudbaer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What are you talking about ? Can you elaborate or are you just throwing around some nice sounding phrases ?

  11. From TFA... by Mad+Merlin · · Score: 2, Interesting
    SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 also adds the Linphone software for voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP); the Firefox Web browser; and the F-Spot photo organizer software. And it comes with the latest versions of graphical interface software, Gnome 2.10 and KDE 3.4.

    They're planning on shipping KDE 3.4 when it's released, or they're including the current RC?

    1. Re:From TFA... by Wudbaer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      As SuSE 9.3 is planned to be released around middle of April and KDE 3.4 is due next week IIRC and KDE usually meets its planned release dates quite accurately for such a large project I assume it will have KDE 3.4 final. SuSE usually supplies RPMs of new KDE versions (sometimes even betas and RCs) for the last 2-3 versions of their distro inside 2-3 days after release, sometimes even on the same day.

      I wish they would do the same for Gnome.

    2. Re:From TFA... by Rydia · · Score: 2, Interesting

      They do that because SuSE has a load of people on staff that work on KDE. Not so with gnome.

      Which has, much to my chagrin, made KDE the preferred SuSE desktop, making us SuSE gnome users feel a little shunted-off.

  12. Licensing Cost by dduardo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Does this mean you have to pay extra for each instance of suse you run under Xen?

  13. Slashdot by northcat · · Score: 2, Insightful

    A distro added a package. Why is this being reported on slashdot?

    1. Re:Slashdot by subgrappler · · Score: 3, Informative

      lots of distros are adding support for xen or at least have plans to. Xen support is supposed to be merged into the kernel in the near future as well. Also, big boys like IBM are starting to show lots of interest in Xen... my point is it's a significant trend where as a few months ago most people were still saying "wtf is xen? those aliens from HL2?"

  14. The Easy Wipe OS! by ABCC · · Score: 2, Funny

    A good use for this sort of thing is letting normal users onto a pc without making a mess of it, think:

    "Xen and the art of computer maintanance"

    1. Re:The Easy Wipe OS! by mike260 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This is mentioned on their roadmap. On 3.0, you'll be able to fork a VM, let a luser loose on it, and then just throw it away along with all the crap they've managed to infect it with.

  15. Re:benchmarks by Chirs · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's faster, but with current hardware it needs support from the guest OS. You basically need to build the guest kernel to run within Xen.

    This is fairly straightforward for open-source OS's, but is why you can't currently run windows on top of Xen.

  16. Re:Why? by LWATCDR · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Lets you try out new distros or OS with ease.
    Allows you to partition a computer into many virtual machines.
    Want to give 10 people there own servers to play with? Just use Xen. Great for ISPs.

    The real question is what do you mean by a "normal" user. Just because you do not have a use for it and you might not does not mean that many people will. I have no use for AIM but I know some people seem to.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  17. Re:set flamethrowers to cinders by Mad+Merlin · · Score: 2, Informative

    iTunes already works in Wine. There has been some significant development to get it working more smoothly lately, especially in Crossover Office, but also in the vanilla Wine tree. No idea about the other app you mentioned, I've never heard of it, but it's probably worth giving it a whirl in Wine.

  18. RTFM by slobber · · Score: 2, Informative

    1.4 Does Xen support Microsoft Windows?

    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.

    --
    "You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
  19. Novell Marketing: "Why Us?" by mosel-saar-ruwer · · Score: 2, Funny

    Why?

    Zen... Xen... Zen... Xen... Zen... Xen...

    Novell Marketing, the biggest bunch of punching bags in the history of the technology industry, has gotta be asking themselves, "Why us?"

  20. how about QEMU by Fourier · · Score: 3, Informative

    QEMU looks like a worthy replacement for VMWare, especially given the recent release of the accelerator module. Fabrice is hoping for corporate support of the project, and IMO he is as deserving as anyone.

  21. To piss off people like you by A+nonymous+Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    See, there's a vast uber-wing conspiracy among the internautti to waste the time of hard working productive people like yourself, who have so little time during the day for keeping up to date that they don't have time to read headlines, only stories, and thus when you read the story directly and find you have wasted your time, and then post on slashdot to complain about it, the internautti cackle with glee at another success story.

    The answer, of course, is to read the headlines first, not read the stories just because they are available, and not play the internautti's game. Eventually, if such a radical notion spreads far and wide, or even short and narrow, the internautti will be disillusioned and find some other amusement.

  22. This isn't LOL by barrkel · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is multiple Linuxes running on a VMM: Virtual Machine Monitor. The Linuxes run side by side, none run inside each other.

    The technique takes advantage of the multiple rings (0-3) on Intel. Normally Linux (and other kernels) run on ring 0, but with Xen the Xen VMM runs on ring 0 while Linux and other guest OSs run on ring 1, while user-mode programs continue to run on ring 3.

  23. Re:One of the benefits of xen by mr_majestyk · · Score: 3, Funny

    >> How exactly does Linux in a VM run Wine better than Linux
    >> not in a VM?
    > Well separation of states and state flow for one


    Yes, but won't the impedance mismatch between the flow and the state potentially result in a performance penalty? I would think that one of the most significant properties of this environment would be that the system resource flow rate is constant in a steady-state flow system. This means there would be no accumulation of resources within any component of the system.

  24. The real question is... by kmartshopper · · Score: 2, Funny

    when will people start pronouncing SuSE correctly in the workplace?

    I'm sure I'll hear Xen called "X-men" at some point.

  25. Re:How's this different? by pasti · · Score: 3, Informative

    There's a separate root directory for each vserver, which means one can install whatever Linux distribution one wants in there, as long as the distribution doesn't depend on a special kernel (it shouldn't: near-metal operations will be done in the host kernel). Your argument is at fault here.

    There's only one kernel instance running though, which is your point I believe. Xen seems to support non-linux OSes such as FreeBSD.

  26. Re:Why? by hey! · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  27. Linux Licensing by nurb432 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    True, there is no license fee for 'core' Linux, but if you run any of the VAR components of distribution X, there might be some licensing issues.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  28. Re:Hopefully a non-Xen kernel as well... by FauxPasIII · · Score: 2, Informative

    > Well, why would you want power management on a virtual machine? the host machine should manage the power...

    Never used Xen, have you? You have to run a Xen-patched kernel as the HOST system, and THAT is what doesn't
    support power management. i.e. if you're running Xen, you cannot simultaneously use any power management features
    of your hardware.

    --
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