"Today, we're making the first source code of our OpenSolaris on Xen project available to the OpenSolaris developer community. There are many bugs still in waiting, many puzzles to be solved, many things left to do. Because we don't believe the developer community only wants finished projects to test. We believe that some developers want to participate during the development process, and now this project can open its doors to that kind of participation. We wanted to start the conversation with working code. So we have a snapshot of our development tree for OpenSolaris on Xen, synced up with Nevada build 31. That code snapshot should be able to boot and run on all the hardware that build 31 can today, plus it can boot as a diskless unprivileged domain on Xen 3.0."
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Member since:2005-07-06
Good point about ZFS! My primary project is a filesystem virtualisation layer called XenFS, which will enable you to pass through a filesystem from dom0 to a domU with good performance - so one day, with a Solaris XenFS server, you could re-export a ZFS filesystem to Linux. It's analogous to the virtual block and network devices we already have but at a much higher level.
Combined with the driver domains functionality, you could eventually have a ZFS driver domain, Linux device driver domains, and any dom0 OS you wanted (for instance). It's less like choosing an OS and more of composing together OS features you want. Of course, too many layers will reduce performance eventually but multicore chips will mitigate this somewhat.
It seems to me that it's technically possible to have Xen-unaware OSes running as domain 0. However, this would be a pain to implement and I can't see it being done any time soon. Your MacOS X fantasy is more likely to be achieved by running a Linux dom0 to provide disk / network services but giving a MacOS X domU direct access to the graphics / sound hardware. This is certainly feasible. It'd be helpful to see a Darwin/Xen port, rather than having to use full virtualisation.
Also, to complete the fantasy, you'd want to use an Intel Mac with Intel's VT enabled, so that you could run unmodified OSes too ;-) [I'm not sure what hte status of VT on the mac is at the moment!]
Member since:2005-11-17
The reason for wanting MacOS X Intel as dom0 is because Apple has stated that they will not support running of MacOS X on anything but Apple hardware. I believe they will do quite a lot to enforce this - sure people will hack around it but thats not my interest. Getting Darwin/Xen up is one thing but it is quite a step away from having MacOS X up. For one thing Darwin still depends on PC BIOS but MacOS X Intel boots from EFI (without PC BIOS legacy support).
Member since:
2005-11-17
and when we have dom0 support in Solaris it allows Linux beneift (indirectly) from Solaris features such as ZFS :-)
Now if we could just have MacOS X as a Xen dom0 on an Intel Mac I'd be such a happy bunny!