"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
People have already experimented with passing through graphics devices to non-dom0 OS images, so it could happen sooner than you think. These experimenters just gave one graphics card to dom0, one to the domU.
If you don't want two graphics cards, it's not the end of the world. dom0 currently controls all the hardware, takes over the screen, etc, but that doesn't always have to be true. If a Linux dom0 can be made to run "headless" (i.e. just give up control of the screen), then a MacOS domU can boot on top of it and control the screen itself. By giving appropriate access to the platform hardware, I'd imagine MacOS could be persuaded to boot like this. And it seems legal (or within the intent of the license, anyhow) since you're still running on the Mac.
So I think it's quite possible to do something like you describe, but it's likely to be a while before it happens. Windows users will have a similar wish though, so there's quite possibly motivation from that direction. It's just not such a focus for Xen - yet - as running on servers.
Happy birthday!
Member since:
2005-11-17
Its exactly because I do want the pretty graphics etc from MacOS X that I want it to be dom0 rather than domU. For Solaris, *BSD, *Linux running in domU's my graphics needs aren't much above a terminal window and an email client.
It would be nice if MacOS X could be dom0 but as you said unmodified dom0 is really hard and I can't see the motivation from Apple to do this given the agreements with Microsoft on Virtual PC. But I can wish, its my birthday soon :-)
Cheers.