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Linux Gains Two New Virtualization Solutions

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the almost-as-good-as-the-real-thing dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The upcoming 2.6.23 kernel has gained two new virtualization solutions. According to KernelTrap, both Xen and lguest have been merged into the mainline kernel. These two virtualization solutions join the already merged KVM, offering Linux multiple ways to run multiple virtual machines each running their own OS."

1 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Could somebody clear this up for us? by Chris+Snook · · Score: 5, Informative

    These aren't even close to the same solution. KVM provides hardware-assisted virtualization, with Linux as the hypervisor. Lguest provides linux-in-linux paravirtualization (no hardware support), and is extremely lightweight (5000 lines of code, total), but lacks many advanced features. Xen provides both paravirtualization and full virtualization, runs under a custom hypervisor intended to run multiple different OSes (Linux, Solaris, Windows, etc.) simultaneously, and has a plethora of sophisticated features, such as live migration (and all the maintenance headache of the correspondingly huge codebase).

    They each fill very different niches, so there are very good reasons for having all 3 in the kernel.

    --
    There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.