Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 14th Aug 2007 17:48 UTC, submitted by diegocg
OSNews, Generic OSes The GNU libc maintainer writes: "People are starting to realize how broken the Xen model is with its privileged Dom0 domain. But the actions they want to take are simply ridiculous: they want to add the drivers back into the hypervisor. There are many technical reasons why this is a terrible idea. You'd have to add all the PCI handling and lots of other lowlevel code which is now maintained as part of the Linux kernel. But this is of course also the direction of VMWare who loudly proclaim that in the future we won't have OS as they exist today."
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My thoughts on Xen
by Don T. Bothers on Tue 14th Aug 2007 18:23 UTC
Don T. Bothers
Member since:
2006-03-15

I pretty much figured out that Xen was not the be-all end-all for virtualization by how the different "technical" minded companies reacted to Xen.

1) The FreeBSD community pretty much gave up on getting Xen running fully within FreeBSD and instead focused on making jails better and putting a KVM infrastructure (based on Linux's implementation) into FreeBSD.
2) Linus refused to go the Xen way and instead pushed for the KVM implementation within the kernel.
3) RedHat integrated Xen into RHEL but made all its managment tool independent of Xen so they can easily switch to better virtualization technology when they come along while giving administrators an easy migration route and not forcing them to waste everything they learned.

Of course, certain distributions (won't name them), who care more about hype than acknowledge technical excellence, did push Xen prematurely. But when some technology is fundamentally flawed, there is usually a lot of resistence. I consider Xen's failure to gain major usage a very good thing.

Oh, yeah, one more thing. I find it ironic VMWare is proclaiming the operating system dead. Wait a few more years, when every operating system has virtualization capabilities that are based on standards, and then they will see the irony too.

Edited 2007-08-14 18:25