Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Dec 2005 20:31 UTC, submitted by HeLfReZ
Xen 3.0 has been released. "We've been seeing good stability on the XenRT regression tests for the last couple of weeks, and the number of bug reports submitted to bugzilla have dropped right down." Get it here. "Along with the usual binary install tarball, we've created a new live-iso demo CD, and some RPM packages for common linux distros."
Thread beginning with comment 69124
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE[2]: Good to here Xen news
by haugland on Tue 6th Dec 2005 13:32
in reply to "RE: Good to here Xen news"
Member since:2005-07-07
I have a couple of question I hope you can answer.
As far as I understand, Xen requires Vanderpool or Pacifica technology. All Pacifica enabled CPU's are 64-bits and does not require PAE. Is any of the Vanderpool enabled CPU's 32-bit or is there some other explanation for implementing PAE?
I can understand that an Operating System can benefit from being aware of a hypervisor, but is necessary to have a modified kernel to run the OS?
Member since:
2005-07-06
(disclaimer: am a Xen dev, should have mentioned it in the other post sorry. If anyone disagrees my points, feel free to roast me for justification;-)
Xen 3.0 adds support for x86_64 and for PAE mode on x86_32 (older systems with > 4Gig of memory). It also adds a beta port for IA64, with ports to other architectures being still in progress.
Vanderpool support is already integrated and has been demonstrated (at Intel IDF) running Windows XP. This support needs further development to perform as well as we want - there are plans to rearchitect the full virtualisation IO model for a future release. Much of the logic (particularly for IO) will be common with Pacifica, so these changes will also benefit AMD users, after AMD release the Pacifica support patch they've been working on.
Regarding Xen-native paravirtualised OS support:
Native ports are able to achieve the maximal available performance and do not need virtualisation-aware hardware to run.
Right now, a Xen 3.0 aware patch for Linux 2.6 is available. We're intending to get Xen-awareness checked into the mainline Linux kernel in the future. NetBSD 3 includes Xen 2.0 support but Xen 3.0 support is being worked on by those guys. FreeBSD 6 will support Xen 3.0 at some point in the future - most of the code is written but it needs updating for recent changes in both FreeBSD and Xen. The Plan 9 port is also being updated, and there have been rumblings of ports of both Minix and ReactOS.
Note that most of the porting is being worked on by community members, not the core Xen team.