"Red Hat today released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5, featuring a 2.6.9-55.EL kernel paravirtualized for i686 and x86_64 machines. RHEL 4.5 also provides NFS performance metrics and updated kernel support for Infiniband connectivity, according to the release announcement."
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Member since:2006-01-09
I know what para vs. full virtualisation is, but you seem to be hinting that these guest OSes have been modified to enable that.....?
As far as I know, only non-VT/Pacifica hosts would need a guest to run a modified kernel (the old Windows on Xen problem).
So has 4.5 been modified such that your could paravirtualise them on old processors, is that your point or am I missing something?
Member since:2005-11-05
Yes, RHEL4.5 sports a paravirtualized kernel so that it can run paravirtualized on non VT hardware aka to support things like it running as a RHEL5 domU (guest in Xen terms). Paravirtualization does not need VT hardware (by design).
Xen has ran on non-vt hardware (using paravirtualization) until fairly recently where they support hardware virtualization using some hacks and code ripped out of qemu. Here is a decent page on Xen:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8909
Also note that Redhat calls their Xen integration genericly as "Virtualization" because XenSource started getting really strict on trademarks of the Xen name.
Sorry for flaming you earlier, I woke up in a not so nice manner.
Edit:
Here is a link where a Redhat rep says pretty much what I just did about RHEL4.5 running paravirtualized (without VT hardware) under RHEL5.
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3663126
Edited 2007-05-04 17:53
Member since:
2005-11-05
Wrong... this is PARAVIRTUALIZATION.
If you don't understand paravirtualization, wikipedia it. With older versions of redhat, you could run them fully virtualized, but that never runs as fast or well as when paravirtualized.
By that note, you can run RHEL3 "virtualized", but not paravirtualized. Please read my post and teach yourself about the benefits of paravirtualization. Then you might understand why this is exciting news.