"This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen on a Debian Sarge system. Xen lets you create guest operating systems, so called 'virtual machines' or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are totally independent from each other."
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Member since:
2005-08-07
Which really isn't a hypervisor. 
Oh, wow, I'm impressed.
I wish the rest of us could leave out the hard part and call ourselves "done" like this project. I mean, it's totally acceptable and practical to have to change the operating system internals, which in most cases you don't have access to in order to run it on Xen, right? (end sarcasm)
Member since:2005-07-06
> Which really isn't a hypervisor.
It runs on the bare metal and manages sharing the machines resources between multiple operating system images which run at a lower privilege level than Xen itself... Sounds like a hypervisor.
> totally acceptable and practical to have to change the
> operating system internals
Well, it's acceptable to build a hypervisor which requires a modified architecture layer in the OS, in the same way that it's acceptable to build a new machine architecture and port Linux (for instance) to run on it... People who don't want to run on this architecture don't have to. Linus doesn't have to take the patch. Nobody loses out here.
If you're not bothered by the performance gains from virtualisation awareness, and/or you can't modify the guest operating system you want to use full virtualisation. Not doing full virtualisation if the hardware doesn't support it properly is part of the point - if it's important to you there are alternative products that satisfy that need.
If you want full virtualisation under Xen you need to run on Intel VT or AMD Pacifica hardware. If you need to run virtualised Windows (or a legacy Linux, *BSD, etc from before Xen-awareness was available for those systems) on your current hardware, you're probably not in Xen's target market. You should probably be running one of the non-hypervisor virtual machine systems such as QEmu, MS VS, or (best of all) VMware Player/Server.
Member since:
2005-07-09
