Next Monday (11/04/2005), 18:30, the Haifa Linux Club will once again meet to hear Muli Ben-Yehuda (aka me) talk about
The Xen hypervisor
You are all invited! More info on how to get to the meeting etc. at
the haifux website: http://www.haifux.org.
Topics to be covered include a general introduction, design and
implementation of Xen, the new Xen 2.0 IO model and future plans.
[1] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/index.html
[2] A short overview of Xen, from
http://www.mulix.org/lectures/OLS2004.html:
Xen is a virtual machine monitor, developed by the University of
Cambridge Computer Laboratory. Unlike VMWare, which provides complete
virtualization, guest operating systems need to be ported to the Xen
environment. So far, Linux 2.4 and 2.6 have been ported, as well as
NetBSD, FreeBSD and Plan9, and Windows XP. The Windows XP port was
done in collaboration with MS Research, and took much longer than the
Linux port...
Xen works by letting the monitor (hypervisor) run in ring 0, and the
guest OS run in ring 1. Userspace runs in ring 3, as usual. From a
Linux point of view, porting Linux to Xen (refereed to as XenoLinux)
is just a matter of implementing the arch specific hooks in Linux - no
core kernel files are modified!
Xen provides secure protection between VMs (unlike e.g. coLinux),
allows flexible partitioning of resources, and supports seamless
low-latency migration of running VMs(!). They also claims impressive
performance numbers, within 3% of the host performance.
--
Muli Ben-Yehuda
http://www.mulix.org | http://mulix.livejournal.com/
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