"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: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:
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?