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New Xen Linux Distribution
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/"
There's a serious lack of information on that site. Like what the purpose of building yet another distro was, what need they were filling, other than learning to roll your own distro.
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More power to them. I personally use MacOS X and FreeBSD daily. I consider setting up a Linux machine from time to time (okay mods, I'm not setting up flamebait here), but it gets to be a real turnoff finding a more or less 'standard' distro that isn't a pain to set up. FreeBSD isn't elegant at all (PC-BSD seems to be stepping up to fill that need nicely), but at least it's the devil I know (pun intended).
Gentoo and/or Debian based systems at least seem to be the way to go these days, but the every-increasing number of distros bugs me. Don't want to pick a distro only to find it discontinued and have to load a new one.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
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:
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!
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
It's in rawhide, but it's the same as Suse, it's there but it's not installed by default.
Why yet another distribution when everyone's favourite operating system already works, even on Xen - ``Of course it runs NetBSD!'' :)
e n.png 4 1 t ml
Some links:
* What does Xen look like - a screenshot:
http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/in-Action/hubertf-x
* Installation:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/howto.html
* General information on NetBSD/Xen:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/
* Live CD with Debian, NetBSD and FreeBSD:
http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/blog.html#20050421_00
* Benchmarking:
http://www.iki.fi/kuparine/comp/xendom0/xendom0.h
- Hubert
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
Xen does have a lot of cool virtual machine features that you wont find in the standard kernel, or anywhere outside of a Z series machine. One of the nicest things that hasnt been meantioned here yet is the live migration of domains. That was what initialy made us look at xen - as a system to facilitate hardware upgrades of comodity servers without woring about the downtime it will cause your services. If you have all your services running as xen domains, you can migrate them to another physical computer on the same subnet, with no downtime of your network connections. Any users connected wont even notice the slight(200ms) pause in the domain as the last memory pages are swaped over. Another nice feature of xen is its amazing speed. In our tests at COSI, we found that there was only a 5-10% performace hit by running a database or webserver in a xen domain instead of nativly, completly destroying VMwares perfomance numbers. If you want more information about the performace aspect, you can find a couple of papers that have been written by other COSI members on the COSI webpage about xen.
Ed - debian installer hacker for Xenophilia
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