Linux Kernel 2.6.20 Released

diegocgteleline.es writes "After two months of development, Linux 2.6.20 has been released. This release includes two different virtualization implementations: KVM: full-virtualization capabilities using Intel/AMD virtualization extensions and a paravirtualization implementation usable by different hypervisors. Additionally, 2.6.20 includes PS3 support, a fault injection debugging feature, UDP-lite support, better per-process IO accounting, relative atime, relocatable x86 kernel, some x86 microoptimizations, lockless radix-tree readside, shared pagetables for hugetbl, and many other things. Read the list of changes for more details."

Comments

linux-wlan-ng injection

[sinclair44]

Does anyone know if this fixes packet injection on Prism wireless adapter cards using the linux-wlan-ng driver and the aircrack-ng patch? It's been broken since 2.6.12 (but worked before that)...

kvm versus vmware

[digitalsushi]

VMWare released their server product recently, for free, and it's basically the same thing as VMWare workstation, except workstation is expensive and does slightly less. (So VMWare server is pretty sweet. Check it out if you havent heard of it. We use it to virtualize several windows XP guests on a linux host).

I've looked at a KVM whitepaper and it doesn't look like it's quite stable yet. The paper did however mention that it's usably fast on a current processor. (Given it requires the VT extensions, it's inevitable not to have a current processor!)

Can anyone comment on whether KVM is a reasonable alternative to the VMWare Server product?

Re:kvm versus vmware

[arkhan_jg]

Not yet. I've played with it, and it's basically an alternative to the qemu closed-source module, it's using a modified qemu userland. The advantage of using a VT/SVM capable processor with KVM means you can run an unmodified guest OS; i.e. no paravirtualised custom drivers needed.

Its biggest weakness is speed. VMware have had years of tweaking and finetuning, while kvm is very very new, and slow in certain areas. General desktop is fine, but network speed was painfully bad - for example - when I tried version 10. Plenty of work coming down the pipe, and it looks like it could be a powerful opensource virtualisation tool - in time. Right now, it is a bit fiddly to get running, and not quite ready for a production environment.

For now I'd stick to VMWare or virtualbox, but definitely have another look at KVM in say, 6 months time.