With little fanfare, User Mode Linux (UML) has been merged into Linus’ BitKeeper tree. The merge followed a patch by UML author Jeff Dike, resynching UML with the 2.5.34 development kernel.
From the UML homepage, User-Mode Linux provides you with a virtual machine that offers “a safe, secure way of running Linux versions and Linux processes. Run buggy software, experiment with new Linux kernels or distributions, and poke around in the internals of Linux, all without risking your main Linux setup.”
So is this some sort of virtualiser like VMware? How does it compare to VMWare and similar apps, or to the kind of Linux partitions that IBM runs on Z/OS? What are the advantages of this being integrated into the kernel, as opposed to being an external app plus a few kernel modules (like VMware)?
da sh!t
Hi,
I have already installed jails under FreeBSD and I know that jails are very fast (low cpu- and memory-usage). How does UML compare to jails?
Ciao,
Sebastian
UML (last version I tried) does not offer graphic card virtualization like VMWare, so you have to use the virtual OS from command line. Unlike jails, you install a completely new Linux OS. So, if you’re running something like Mandrake for the desktop, but you prefer a different distro as a server OS, you can run it under UML for server operations. In terms of performance, an educated guess would be that the performance would be much better than VMWare, but not quite as good as jails (but then also more powerful than jails).
Wonder how many people are going to discover the large number of UML books in the computer section of a book store and then be throughly dissapointed when they buy one?
UML stands for “Unified Modelling Language”, it’s just plain dumb for Linux to reuse an acronym when it’s already used in the same industry.
True, but there are only so many acronyms unless you get them to be rather long. One solution could be to stop using so many acronyms. Still I don’t think your going to get them to change. Changing names or what things mean is hard. Look at the FSF (yet another acronym) and their trying to change the primary definition of “Free” from what the world thinks it means to what they think it means, yes it’s a proper definition but not the common one. This comes back to proper naming or using proper words. The FSF could have avoided this proplem and saved use from the whole free as in beer and whatever stuff if the had used a differant word or removed the stick from their @$$. But they probably wanted a symetrical acronym (anagram i think it is) or something like that. They arn’t going to change. I don’t this new UML will change ether. Am I the only one that when naming something thinks about wether or not the name or acronym is allready used?
“Pallindrome” is the word. As in “the pallindrome of bolton is notlob”.
Yup the UML acronym is not the best, just about anyone have heard of Unified Modelling Language, but not of User Mode Linux.
How about LOL – Linux on Linux.
LP – Linux the Process(as oposed to Linux the Kernel).
Virtual Linux ?
Lin4Lin?
VLK – Virtual Linux Kernel ?
LIUS – Linux in User Space ?
since when have the computer related fields cared about acronym collisions?
ISA
instruction set architexture
industry standard architexture
information storage architexture(IIRC, was a term in a database class i had)
ATM
Adobe Type Manager
Automatic Teller Machine
At the Moment
Asynchronous Transfer Mode
Can you say FreeBSD jail? lol
Lets see when KSE and GEOM get cloned by Linux.
this doesnt compare to freebsd jails really, at least as i understand them
this is literally running a copy of the linux kernel on top of another copy of the linux kernel.
all in all i think that UML is quite impressive. who needs dedicated machines for webhosting? give each customer their own virtual linux box. a security compromise on one instance doesnt effect the others, all with a single server machine.
just as soon as xfree and myself get along, im definately planning on playing with UML
You all might want to try vserver. Same idea but using the same kernel, ie., same concept as jail.
J:wq