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New Xen Linux Distribution

Posted by Hemos on from the yet-more-information dept.

f5hacka writes "Four students at Clarkson University developed a new linux distribution based on the Xen kernel. The distribution is called Xenophilia. Xenophilia is a derivative of Debian Linux and uses the new Debian installer to install its packages. Its homepage is available at http://cosi.clarkson.edu/xen/. The distribution is available for download at http://mirror.clarkson.edu/pub/distributions/xenop hilia/"

6 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. Read the *other* fine article. by FooAtWFU · · Score: 1, Informative

    If you RTFA on the 'Xen' kernel, you'd see what's news. The Xen kernel supports some Nifty Virtual Machine Stuff which you won't find in a standard kernel or, as far as I'm aware, in any of the big-name distributions. This is New and Cool.

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    1. Re:Read the *other* fine article. by hankaholic · · Score: 4, Informative
      If you RTFA on the 'Xen' kernel, you'd see what's news. The Xen kernel supports some Nifty Virtual Machine Stuff which you won't find in a standard kernel


      Bzzt. There is no mention of the "Xen kernel" in the articles cited, so it's unclear as to which Fucking Article you're talking about.

      chet@chet:~$ links -dump http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/ | grep -i kernel
      chet@chet:~$ links -dump http://cosi.clarkson.edu/xen/ | grep -i kernel
      chet@chet:~$

      Xen is a layer which allows the user to boot multiple operating systems at the same time. It happens to include modifications to the Linux kernel which allow the user to do virtualization stuff that may seem "New and Cool" to the average X86 user who hasn't heard of virtual machines, but is more like "Old and Busted" for those who've heard of IBM outside of the SCO case.

      According to some article sponsored by IBM:

      "Since 1972, VM has been providing the capabilities to "virtualize" the complete S/370, S/390, and zSeries architecture allowing a single physical processor to run multiple guest operating system [sic] simultaneously with each guest thinking it has complete control of the system. Historically, MVS and VSE the operating systems most likely to be run as VM guests, but now with the increasing role of Linux in the data center, it is becoming a popular VM guest system as well."


      More informative than the links provided is the Xen user documentation, especially sections 2.3.3, 2.4.1, and most of 3.

      A good start for reading about the history of VM would be to Google for "IBM VM".
      --
      Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
    2. Re:Read the *other* fine article. by JabberWokky · · Score: 4, Informative
      Consider yourself aware. It's one of the big point features for the version of SUSE that just came out.

      --
      Evan

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  2. Re:Fedora? by wildcard84 · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's in rawhide, but it's the same as Suse, it's there but it's not installed by default.

  3. Re:Wow. I RTFA and it didn't matter... by edwarddes · · Score: 2, Informative

    The site doesnt have much information on it yet because it just went live last night. The main point was to just get the distribution out there to the people who already know what xen is, so that they can help test it.

    Xenophilia isnt so much a new distribution, as it is a hacked set of debian installer packages that replace the kernel installation stages with a new set of stages that install and configure the xen hypervisor and the xen kernel for domain 0. All the other packages are identical to the debian packages from sarge.

    If you had throughly looked at the site you would have noticed the plethora of links to additional content; tutorial that we wrote, and the origonal xen documentation, that give you all the information you would need about xen.

    Since we based Xenophilia off of debian, you dont have to worry about us dissapperaring and you loosing support. Once the base system is installed, you can just point your apt sources at debians servers and use their packages if you desire.

    Ed - debian installer hacker for Xenophilia

  4. Re:the obvious question here is... by edwarddes · · Score: 2, Informative

    Its actually not a virtual machine running on linux - its linux running on a hypervisor. In the current stable version it supports linux 2.4 or 2.6 as the managing domain, and 2.4, 2.6 netbsd and freebsd as other domains.

    In the past an experimental port of windows was made to an older version of xen, but as far as i can tell it was done under a research liscense from microsoft and cant be released.

    In xen 3, they are planning on having support not only for running modified guest domains, but also running any unmodified system.

    Ed - debian installer hacker for Xenophilia