Many of the integrated chipset GPUs make great Linux MythTV / HTPC boards, in theory. The problem is normally driver support to take advantage of all the great features.
The VIA Unichrome had good video decoding support, but poor drivers too many crippled hardware versions. The new Intel GPUs look like an excellent option, but the video acceleration drivers have not caught up yet.
Any of the ATI boards would also be a great option, when/if the ATI drivers can support video acceleration (XvMC or maybe the new vaapi). Until then, ATI is a non-starter.
Also, going forward, a GLSL programmable GPU will probably be required for newer video acceleration. Do these GPUs support GLSL?
Not to be glib, but.. This would be a great demonstration of the value of "Time Machine" backups. Time Machine is not perfect, but it is a good start on a backup system well integrated into the OS. The example problem, data loss, would be really easily recovered via Time Machine.
Beyond the basics that every decent backup app does, the things I like about Time Machine are:
- Integration into Applications. For example: "Show me what my iTunes library or iPhoto library looked like last Thursday"
- Integration into OS install. In the case of disk failure, recovery to previous state is simple - rather than multi-step with a separate backup app.
Some things that need improving:
- Better handling of file exceptions. I keep work data in encrypted disk volumes (DMGs). If I change one byte, the whole huge file needs to be backed up as each change is detected (generating MANY copies of that big DMG). The only other choice is to say "ignore this file/directory". Same thing applies to any large file, such as a VMware VM file. A better option would be to say "Back this file up, but only keep 'n' versions".
- Time Machine has gotten twice, pegging the CPU/fans on my MacBook Pro.
C7 is pretty low end, so this is probably unlikely.
But, it seems like this would make a good CPU for an SMP Linux server system. It's not powerful enough on its own to be a high-end server engine. A single slow core would be more subject to getting swamped while trying to keep up with big tasks. But, throw a second core in there, and it would be a new ballgame.
With the VERY low power usage of these chips, even two of them would be well below the other available options.
For my specific purpose, I'm thinking of this for a Linux server. It's doing many tasks, most of which require very low CPU overhead. But, it also functions as a MythTV backend.. some common tasks related in MythTV can easily take all the CPU power. For example, commercial detection, of HD video transcoding. But, dedicate one CPU to that stuff, and the other could easily keep up with everything else.
I also ran into this.. My suspended VMs needed to be reset to run. Now, I cannot suspend the VMs at all.. they always fail. I have seen reports of kernel panics from other users.
Note that this is the previous version of Parallels (v2.5, I think). The newer one, with 3D acceleration support, is apparently being updated to work with Leopard.
If I need to upgrade to v3.0, that re-opens the decision of whether to switch to VMware Fusion. The cost will be about the same, and I will probably go with VMware.
Wow.. I'm as big an Apple fan as the next guy. My primary desktop is my MacBook Pro, my Mini is my HTPC, I even have an iPhone.
But, unlike may of my brethren, I don't see Apple as infallible. Come on guys.. Installing third party apps is not unreasonable behavior. To expect that they will work through Apple's upgrade process is not either. Don't paint this as "you morons shouldn't expect this to work".
I upgraded my Tiger OS, without ripping out all the things I suspected as possible problems (Parallels being #1 on that list). Of course, I did a complete system backup to a firewire drive first. To my pleasant surprise, Leopard came up without problems. I haven't run Parallels yet, but everything else seems okay.
What the hell is that article talking about? He states it as if MS didn't buy into that junk about a $15Billion valuation.
But, that's exactly what they did do. They paid $250Million for a 1.6% stake in the company. That means it values the whole company at $15.6Billion.
If they had negotiated it down, and got maybe 20% of the company for $500M. Then, they wouldn't have bought into the valuation.. that would have said it's worth $2.5B.
But, the math says MS thinks Facebook is worth $15Billion. I think that's ludicrous. But, then again, the first time I ever went to their site was today. So, I guess I don't really "get" the magic..
Yes, precisely. He doesn't say that he has looked into virtualization code and it has X problems. Or, even virtualization is vulnerable to Y attacks. He says "Those of us who have experience with the gory bits of the x86 architecture can clearly say that we know what would be involved in virtualizing it, and if it was so simple, we would not still be fixing bugs in the exact same area in our operating system going on 12 years."
In other words "I've never really studied the problem. But my guess is that this is hard."
The thing is, his premise looks correct. You don't somehow gain security by moving from physical hosts to combining them as VMs on a single hypervisor. You gain a ton of other efficiencies, but you don't actually gain in security. Some of the examples cited as gaining in security were really just operations improvements afforded by easier separation of VMs as compared to physical hosts.
The question is: how much security do you lose? For most practical purposes, it's not enough to dissuade people from virtualization.
Unfortunately, his message is obscured by the childish way in which he presents it.
Solution for filtering downloaded mail?
on
Free IMAP On Gmail
·
· Score: 1
I use gmail for several chatty mailing lists. This works fine from within the webmail interface, because I just apply the label & skip inbox.. and each mailing list then has its own "folder".
But, for POP clients, this is a pain because they just download ALL new messages, regardless of any classification.
This is especially poor on a limited device with a slow connection, like a smartphone. In that case, I only want to download what is in my Inbox, and not things that have been shuffled off to various folders.
Basically, a folder is equivalent to a label. Move to a folder in IMAP, and it gets the corresponding label in GMail -- and vice versa.
But, I'm curious, what behavior are you looking for in Folders, that you don't get in Labels? For me, Apply Label + Archive is the exact same thing -- except I'm not limited to a single folder/label. The main difference I can think of is the actual storage of the message data. In true folders, the messages are separated into different files. But, in webmail you don't have access to the raw data anyway.
> It's not enough for using other entertainment that produce livre surround sound in real-time.
But, what home theater apps produce live multi-channel audio? DVDs, ATSC recordings, etc. all have pre-encoded digital audio.
The only thing I know of that generates multi-channel audio are games. While this little box looks great for home theater (HTPC) use, it does not look like a gaming rig.
I've tried several UPnP devices with my MythTV server (newer MythTV versions have UPnP built-in), although not a gaming box like the PS3/XBox360.
In all cases, the video playback left a lot to be desired. Some HD programs would play back just fine, but others would only give audio + black screen. That might be better with a software based device, like the game boxes.
But, the worse problem was the weak playback controls. FF/REW was uselessly slow. Jump FWD/BACK didn't work at all.
In MythTV, perhaps the best feature it has is the automatic commercial detection and skipping. With the UPnP devices, you lose that sort of control. Another workaround is a good/quick implementation of 30 second skip, to manually zip through commercials. But, the UPnP devices were very poor at this.
That's why I was saying that an open protocol/API is needed to get a better level of integration than exists with UPnP devices.
The one thing they could do to interest me is offer the ability to interoperate with third party software.
- Define a set of acceptable video formats that the unit will play, starting with ATSC HDTV formats.
- Create a simple networking protocol to interact with PCs/Servers. Maybe UPnP is good enough, maybe not. It needs to stream the video and allow for flexible playback (FF/REW, Jump n seconds, jump to this point in time, pause, etc.)
An HD-DVD player, which could also play games, and can interact with my MythTV backend and Mac OS X iLife Apps (view photos, play movies, play unencrypted music) would be a no-brainer.
A game unit which also connects to Windows Media Center is not interesting.. Doesn't it already do that?? I'm not interested in a Windows-based media server, with all the related costs and limitations.
Open Source Gems?
on
GPU Gems 3
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Are any OSS projects using these capabilities?
As a non-gamer, I'm primarily interested in video acceleration.. XvMC is fairly limited, and I have seen talk of doing GPU acceleration, like GLSL, on the following OSS projects:
MythTV MPlayer + ffmpeg VLC XBMC Linux
Anyone know what the "state of the art" is for GPU accelerated video in open source?
If you do any development, the Xcode update in Leopard look quite nice.
- Interface Builder is supposed to be a completely new app (I hope it's good.. I liked the old one) - It has built-in versioning / snapshots (probably related to the "Time Machine" feature) - Objective-C 2.0, now has garbage collection - 64 bit Cocoa support (as opposed to only non-GUI apps in previous versions).
Xcode and Time Machine and maaybe DVD Player updates (we'll see how substantial they are) are my main interests in Leopard. Other than that, I can do without the eye candy.. I don't remember the last time I used a widget in Tiger.
So, does this mean it can be installed on Windows 2000?
I use Win2K in a virtual machine, and have never had the need to upgrade to XP or Vista.
One of the few issues I have run into with staying on Win2K is the inability to run IE7. Not that I want to run it.. I am quite happy with Firefox. But, some projects I am working on have www components that I would like to verify with IE7. So, this would be nice to have.
I had an ISDN connection to my corporate network way back when. It's not as fast as DSL or Cable connections, but it was leaps and bounds better than dialup. The low latency, and always-on access are tons better. Also, the bandwidth is really not bad, 2 B channels are 128Kbps.
I just looked on eBay, and there are several Ascend Pipeline ISDN routers, which is what I used, and they are dirt cheap.
I fully support this guy. Some times it is worth wasting your time and money to bring attention to a wrong. It's just a matter of degrees for where you draw the line on what you would be willing to go through. For me, it's definitely not as far as he went.
I do walk past the receipt checkers most of the time. A simple "No Thanks" or "Hi, how ya doin?" without breaking stride is usually not resisted. I've never actually been chased outside the store.
If I was forced to comply inside the store, I would explain that if they insist on searching me they can, but I will return the purchase and cease to shop there.
If I was outside the store, I would keep walking - rather than get in a car where they can block your path. By walking, you give them the choice to give up or assault you to stop your exit. At that point, you would have a much better case against them, and/or the option to physically defend yourself. Also, by keeping yourself and the bags out in the open, you eliminate any claims that you had more stolen items when you left the store.. In the car, they could claim you removed items and hid them.
Obviously, you also need to vote with your dollars. Don't shop at stores that you find offensive, and try to draw attention to their practices.
Wow, those screenshots look about a decade behind current versions of MS Office or Apple iWork. AbiWord looks significantly better than the Lotus word processor (judging only by the screenshots and having used AbiWord). The least they could do is spice up their marketing pages a bit, and put their best foot forward.
Are those apps from their old Lotus suite? I used those way back in the OS/2 2.x days, when they were the only option for OS/2 Office Suites. The apps don't look like they've improved much since then.
Or, are they (as some here claim) based on OpenOffice?
He's referring to the terminology.. "Symmetric" multiprocessing. Symmetric implies a balance, often a mirroring of equal sides.
Obviously in the case of three cores, it's not going to be literally "symmetrical".
He goes on to say "AMD offers that an odd number of processors can slice at that workload as well, just as efficiently", so it's not like he's spreading FUD or something...
The last time an effort like this was undertaken, it was for Jim Gray (Database researcher, Microsoft Fellow), who had disappeared sailing from San Francisco. I checked on that for a while, but never saw any more information.
Was anything ever found in the search for Jim Gray? No remnants of his boat, or other signs of what happened?
Seconded. Linux+MythTV is already a top notch DVR option, which would really benefit from video improvements.
But, there are a few horses to choose from (all with their share of warts):
NVidia - Closed binary blob, supports XvMC for MPEG2 accel. Works some of the time, for some that try it.
Intel - Only very basic XvMC support today, but they have a very nice effort towards open source drivers and a new video acceleration API for MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264 support, and VLD support. Looks like a great MythTV option, when it's available/mature.
VIA Unichrome - some features similar to intel above. In theory it's a nice option, and has been available for a long time. In practice, not so much. Spotty support for hardware versions, most GPUs don't support HD playback, plenty of pitfalls. But, for some people, with the right chipset, and OpenChrome drivers, this works very well.
After looking at newer Solaris offerings, one thing that struck me as a good option is to use Solaris as my Host/Hypervisor OS, and use Linux within Xen VMs on top of Solaris. You get Solaris advantages at the root { ZFS, Solaris Zones, Stable Unix platform, good management tools } while still running any instances of Linux I want, enclosing my services in lightweight Linux VMs.
Last time I checked, Xen was not fully ready for prime time on Solaris. But, that was quite a while ago. If it's Xen is stable, and has good management tools, Solaris would make a good hypervisor. For security reasons, I think it's also nice to have different OS's in the hypervisor and VMs -- making it less likely a single exploit can rip through all layers.
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Many of the integrated chipset GPUs make great Linux MythTV / HTPC boards, in theory. The problem is normally driver support to take advantage of all the great features.
The VIA Unichrome had good video decoding support, but poor drivers too many crippled hardware versions. The new Intel GPUs look like an excellent option, but the video acceleration drivers have not caught up yet.
Any of the ATI boards would also be a great option, when/if the ATI drivers can support video acceleration (XvMC or maybe the new vaapi). Until then, ATI is a non-starter.
Also, going forward, a GLSL programmable GPU will probably be required for newer video acceleration. Do these GPUs support GLSL?
My problem with the Sun JRE is that it is HUGE. Why do I need 100MB+ to run a simple Java application?
Are there other good JRE options for Linux? Maybe something geared towards embedded environments?
Not to be glib, but.. This would be a great demonstration of the value of "Time Machine" backups. Time Machine is not perfect, but it is a good start on a backup system well integrated into the OS. The example problem, data loss, would be really easily recovered via Time Machine.
Beyond the basics that every decent backup app does, the things I like about Time Machine are:
- Integration into Applications. For example: "Show me what my iTunes library or iPhoto library looked like last Thursday"
- Integration into OS install. In the case of disk failure, recovery to previous state is simple - rather than multi-step with a separate backup app.
Some things that need improving:
- Better handling of file exceptions. I keep work data in encrypted disk volumes (DMGs). If I change one byte, the whole huge file needs to be backed up as each change is detected (generating MANY copies of that big DMG). The only other choice is to say "ignore this file/directory". Same thing applies to any large file, such as a VMware VM file. A better option would be to say "Back this file up, but only keep 'n' versions".
- Time Machine has gotten twice, pegging the CPU/fans on my MacBook Pro.
C7 is pretty low end, so this is probably unlikely.
But, it seems like this would make a good CPU for an SMP Linux server system. It's not powerful enough on its own to be a high-end server engine. A single slow core would be more subject to getting swamped while trying to keep up with big tasks. But, throw a second core in there, and it would be a new ballgame.
With the VERY low power usage of these chips, even two of them would be well below the other available options.
For my specific purpose, I'm thinking of this for a Linux server. It's doing many tasks, most of which require very low CPU overhead. But, it also functions as a MythTV backend.. some common tasks related in MythTV can easily take all the CPU power. For example, commercial detection, of HD video transcoding. But, dedicate one CPU to that stuff, and the other could easily keep up with everything else.
I also ran into this.. My suspended VMs needed to be reset to run. Now, I cannot suspend the VMs at all.. they always fail. I have seen reports of kernel panics from other users.
Note that this is the previous version of Parallels (v2.5, I think). The newer one, with 3D acceleration support, is apparently being updated to work with Leopard.
If I need to upgrade to v3.0, that re-opens the decision of whether to switch to VMware Fusion. The cost will be about the same, and I will probably go with VMware.
Wow.. I'm as big an Apple fan as the next guy. My primary desktop is my MacBook Pro, my Mini is my HTPC, I even have an iPhone.
But, unlike may of my brethren, I don't see Apple as infallible. Come on guys.. Installing third party apps is not unreasonable behavior. To expect that they will work through Apple's upgrade process is not either. Don't paint this as "you morons shouldn't expect this to work".
I upgraded my Tiger OS, without ripping out all the things I suspected as possible problems (Parallels being #1 on that list). Of course, I did a complete system backup to a firewire drive first. To my pleasant surprise, Leopard came up without problems. I haven't run Parallels yet, but everything else seems okay.
What the hell is that article talking about? He states it as if MS didn't buy into that junk about a $15Billion valuation.
But, that's exactly what they did do. They paid $250Million for a 1.6% stake in the company. That means it values the whole company at $15.6Billion.
If they had negotiated it down, and got maybe 20% of the company for $500M. Then, they wouldn't have bought into the valuation.. that would have said it's worth $2.5B.
But, the math says MS thinks Facebook is worth $15Billion. I think that's ludicrous. But, then again, the first time I ever went to their site was today. So, I guess I don't really "get" the magic..
Yes, precisely. He doesn't say that he has looked into virtualization code and it has X problems. Or, even virtualization is vulnerable to Y attacks. He says "Those of us who have experience with the gory bits of the x86 architecture can clearly say
that we know what would be involved in virtualizing it, and if it was so simple, we would not still be fixing bugs in the exact same area in our operating system going on 12 years."
In other words "I've never really studied the problem. But my guess is that this is hard."
The thing is, his premise looks correct. You don't somehow gain security by moving from physical hosts to combining them as VMs on a single hypervisor. You gain a ton of other efficiencies, but you don't actually gain in security. Some of the examples cited as gaining in security were really just operations improvements afforded by easier separation of VMs as compared to physical hosts.
The question is: how much security do you lose? For most practical purposes, it's not enough to dissuade people from virtualization.
Unfortunately, his message is obscured by the childish way in which he presents it.
I use gmail for several chatty mailing lists. This works fine from within the webmail interface, because I just apply the label & skip inbox.. and each mailing list then has its own "folder".
But, for POP clients, this is a pain because they just download ALL new messages, regardless of any classification.
This is especially poor on a limited device with a slow connection, like a smartphone. In that case, I only want to download what is in my Inbox, and not things that have been shuffled off to various folders.
Will IMAP allow for this?
Their IMAP behavior chart defines this stuff: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77657
Basically, a folder is equivalent to a label. Move to a folder in IMAP, and it gets the corresponding label in GMail -- and vice versa.
But, I'm curious, what behavior are you looking for in Folders, that you don't get in Labels? For me, Apply Label + Archive is the exact same thing -- except I'm not limited to a single folder/label. The main difference I can think of is the actual storage of the message data. In true folders, the messages are separated into different files. But, in webmail you don't have access to the raw data anyway.
> It's not enough for using other entertainment that produce livre surround sound in real-time.
But, what home theater apps produce live multi-channel audio? DVDs, ATSC recordings, etc. all have pre-encoded digital audio.
The only thing I know of that generates multi-channel audio are games. While this little box looks great for home theater (HTPC) use, it does not look like a gaming rig.
I've tried several UPnP devices with my MythTV server (newer MythTV versions have UPnP built-in), although not a gaming box like the PS3/XBox360.
In all cases, the video playback left a lot to be desired. Some HD programs would play back just fine, but others would only give audio + black screen. That might be better with a software based device, like the game boxes.
But, the worse problem was the weak playback controls. FF/REW was uselessly slow. Jump FWD/BACK didn't work at all.
In MythTV, perhaps the best feature it has is the automatic commercial detection and skipping. With the UPnP devices, you lose that sort of control. Another workaround is a good/quick implementation of 30 second skip, to manually zip through commercials. But, the UPnP devices were very poor at this.
That's why I was saying that an open protocol/API is needed to get a better level of integration than exists with UPnP devices.
The one thing they could do to interest me is offer the ability to interoperate with third party software.
- Define a set of acceptable video formats that the unit will play, starting with ATSC HDTV formats.
- Create a simple networking protocol to interact with PCs/Servers. Maybe UPnP is good enough, maybe not. It needs to stream the video and allow for flexible playback (FF/REW, Jump n seconds, jump to this point in time, pause, etc.)
An HD-DVD player, which could also play games, and can interact with my MythTV backend and Mac OS X iLife Apps (view photos, play movies, play unencrypted music) would be a no-brainer.
A game unit which also connects to Windows Media Center is not interesting.. Doesn't it already do that?? I'm not interested in a Windows-based media server, with all the related costs and limitations.
Are any OSS projects using these capabilities?
As a non-gamer, I'm primarily interested in video acceleration.. XvMC is fairly limited, and I have seen talk of doing GPU acceleration, like GLSL, on the following OSS projects:
MythTV
MPlayer + ffmpeg
VLC
XBMC Linux
Anyone know what the "state of the art" is for GPU accelerated video in open source?
If you do any development, the Xcode update in Leopard look quite nice.
- Interface Builder is supposed to be a completely new app (I hope it's good.. I liked the old one)
- It has built-in versioning / snapshots (probably related to the "Time Machine" feature)
- Objective-C 2.0, now has garbage collection
- 64 bit Cocoa support (as opposed to only non-GUI apps in previous versions).
Xcode and Time Machine and maaybe DVD Player updates (we'll see how substantial they are) are my main interests in Leopard. Other than that, I can do without the eye candy.. I don't remember the last time I used a widget in Tiger.
So, does this mean it can be installed on Windows 2000?
I use Win2K in a virtual machine, and have never had the need to upgrade to XP or Vista.
One of the few issues I have run into with staying on Win2K is the inability to run IE7. Not that I want to run it.. I am quite happy with Firefox. But, some projects I am working on have www components that I would like to verify with IE7. So, this would be nice to have.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot about that..
I had an ISDN connection to my corporate network way back when. It's not as fast as DSL or Cable connections, but it was leaps and bounds better than dialup.
The low latency, and always-on access are tons better. Also, the bandwidth is really not bad, 2 B channels are 128Kbps.
I just looked on eBay, and there are several Ascend Pipeline ISDN routers, which is what I used, and they are dirt cheap.
I fully support this guy. Some times it is worth wasting your time and money to bring attention to a wrong. It's just a matter of degrees for where you draw the line on what you would be willing to go through. For me, it's definitely not as far as he went.
I do walk past the receipt checkers most of the time. A simple "No Thanks" or "Hi, how ya doin?" without breaking stride is usually not resisted. I've never actually been chased outside the store.
If I was forced to comply inside the store, I would explain that if they insist on searching me they can, but I will return the purchase and cease to shop there.
If I was outside the store, I would keep walking - rather than get in a car where they can block your path. By walking, you give them the choice to give up or assault you to stop your exit. At that point, you would have a much better case against them, and/or the option to physically defend yourself. Also, by keeping yourself and the bags out in the open, you eliminate any claims that you had more stolen items when you left the store.. In the car, they could claim you removed items and hid them.
Obviously, you also need to vote with your dollars. Don't shop at stores that you find offensive, and try to draw attention to their practices.
I don't know.. Here's what I'm looking at:
Lotus word processor (ugly tables and charts, and the fabulous "Star" clipart. Definitely "retro"): http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/product_ss_wpe.jspa
AbiWord screenshots (simple and clean): http://www.abisource.com/screenshots/
Apple iWork08 'Pages' (fancy page layout): http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/
Wow, those screenshots look about a decade behind current versions of MS Office or Apple iWork. AbiWord looks significantly better than the Lotus word processor (judging only by the screenshots and having used AbiWord). The least they could do is spice up their marketing pages a bit, and put their best foot forward.
Are those apps from their old Lotus suite? I used those way back in the OS/2 2.x days, when they were the only option for OS/2 Office Suites. The apps don't look like they've improved much since then.
Or, are they (as some here claim) based on OpenOffice?
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/netdict?symmetrical
base word: http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/netdict?symmetry
He's referring to the terminology.. "Symmetric" multiprocessing. Symmetric implies a balance, often a mirroring of equal sides.
Obviously in the case of three cores, it's not going to be literally "symmetrical".
He goes on to say "AMD offers that an odd number of processors can slice at that workload as well, just as efficiently", so it's not like he's spreading FUD or something...
The last time an effort like this was undertaken, it was for Jim Gray (Database researcher, Microsoft Fellow), who had disappeared sailing from San Francisco. I checked on that for a while, but never saw any more information.
Was anything ever found in the search for Jim Gray? No remnants of his boat, or other signs of what happened?
Seconded. Linux+MythTV is already a top notch DVR option, which would really benefit from video improvements.
But, there are a few horses to choose from (all with their share of warts):
NVidia - Closed binary blob, supports XvMC for MPEG2 accel. Works some of the time, for some that try it.
Intel - Only very basic XvMC support today, but they have a very nice effort towards open source drivers and a new video acceleration API for MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264 support, and VLD support. Looks like a great MythTV option, when it's available/mature.
VIA Unichrome - some features similar to intel above. In theory it's a nice option, and has been available for a long time. In practice, not so much. Spotty support for hardware versions, most GPUs don't support HD playback, plenty of pitfalls. But, for some people, with the right chipset, and OpenChrome drivers, this works very well.
After looking at newer Solaris offerings, one thing that struck me as a good option is to use Solaris as my Host/Hypervisor OS, and use Linux within Xen VMs on top of Solaris. You get Solaris advantages at the root { ZFS, Solaris Zones, Stable Unix platform, good management tools } while still running any instances of Linux I want, enclosing my services in lightweight Linux VMs.
Last time I checked, Xen was not fully ready for prime time on Solaris. But, that was quite a while ago. If it's Xen is stable, and has good management tools, Solaris would make a good hypervisor. For security reasons, I think it's also nice to have different OS's in the hypervisor and VMs -- making it less likely a single exploit can rip through all layers.