Posted by Fraser Campbell
Sat, 15 Apr 2006 02:42:00 GMT
Stephen Shankland on CNet’s news.com wrote about the getting VMware’s VMI support into the kernel.
I blogged on this topic a few times in the past month in VMI – Progress Towards a Standard Paravirtualized API? and in Light at the end of the tunnel for kernel-xen?.
Shankland adds to this with some interesting quotes from kernel bigwig Andrew Morton and Xenmaster Ian Pratt.
This quote from Ian Pratt sounds promising:
The Open Source Development Labs has taken an active role in trying to clean up the situation, Pratt added. “OSDL has volunteered to set up meetings to get this stuff discussed,” he said, noting they would possibly be set up through a virtualization task force.
On the other hand:
Morton said the Xen programmers haven’t been active in the interface work. “This has been floating around for a year, and I’ve heard precious little from the Xen team on the topic,” Morton said.
There are a few other interesting statements in the article so you would be best to read it at source if interested.
Once again there is light at the end of the tunnel – I just can’t tell if it’s getting dimmer or brighter.
Posted in Xen, Kernel, VMware | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Sun, 26 Mar 2006 23:51:00 GMT
Chris Wright of Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) has posted 35 patches to the linux kernel list that implement basic Xen support in the kernel.
The patches were dumped to the list on March 22nd, 4 days isn’t a lot of time to digest so large a patchset so there hasn’t been a lot of comment except from those intimately familiar with the topic (IBM, VMWare and Xen developers).
It would be highly surprising to see any of this merged before the 2.6.17 freeze but perhaps by 2.6.18 some progress could be made. It would be nice to finally build kernel-xen from pristine kernel.org kernel sources!
If you’re interested in the patches you can start following the thread here.
Posted in Xen, Kernel | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Thu, 23 Mar 2006 01:00:00 GMT
Several days ago Linux kernel 2.6.16 was announced on the kernel list. Archive posting here.
Since this is very likely to be the kernel in SLES 10 and it is very close to the kernel in Fedora Core 5 it certainly warrants a close look. RHEL 5 is more likely to get a newer kernel since it will not be out until the end of the year.
Interesting additions (in my opinion) are:
- page migration
- oracle cluster filesystem 2
- preliminary patches to support Niagara T1 processor (8 core sparc)
- preliminary patches to support IBM’s Cell processor (9 cores)
- numerous security patches as a result of recent coverity code analysis
Read more...
Posted in Kernel | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Sat, 18 Mar 2006 01:42:00 GMT
There has been a lot of traffic on various linux kernel mailing list of late relating to virtualization. Much of the recent traffic is the result of a proposal and large patchset from VMWare (at least from Zachary Amsden of VMWare).
Zach has been posting periodically on linux-kernel since 1996 and judging by code and feedback he certainly knows his stuff. The latest from Zach is a plethora of patches that implement what VMWare is calling VMI or Paravirtualization API Version 2.0.
You can read the linux-kernel post here for a good overview of the work.
High level goals of the API are portability, high performance, maintainability and extensibility.
In the maintainability section the following statement is made:
To reduce the maintenance burden as much as possible, while still allowing the implementation to accommodate changes, the design provides a stable ABI with semantic invariants.
This statement is sure to raise the ire of kernel developers. More on that later.
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Posted in Misc, Kernel, VMware | no comments | no trackbacks
