On 2003.10.05 07:40 John Hebert wrote: > Great Caesar's ghost! How the heck can you come to that conclusion? > > I think I know. Did you misinterpret the following quote? Or maybe a news > report you read made the misinterpretation? > > "With assistance from Microsoft Research, we have a port of Windows XP to > Xen nearly complete, and are planning a FreeBSD 4.8 port in the near future > (volunteers welcome!)." > > My interpretation is that Microsoft Research is helping with the WinXP port > only. The above quote is from Google's cache of > www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/, since the original site is down > at the moment. >
How I got there was the performance page which stated: " Operating systems running over Xen execute in x86 privilege ring 1 instead of ring 0, which we reserve for Xen. This prevents guest OSes from using the normal privileged instructions to turn on/off interrupts, change page table bases etc. Instead, they must make a 'hypercall' down into Xen to ask the operation to be performed on their behalf. " This is how DRM must work. By using XEN or a XEN derivative for firmware, the owner of a machine can be put into "ring 1". This enables the firmaware to block a copy of a "protected" chunk of memory. Microsoft could use a derivative to of XEN as their next generation BIOS and make sure nothing but "signed" code runs and that no flaged file is every coppied. So, does that make any more sense? Sure, I love the concept of Xen and can see many good uses for it. That does not keep me from worrying that the makers of XP, the Xbox and other horror storries won't abuse it. Microsoft has announced their intentions to "integrate" windoze with Phonenix BIOS. XEN could be the next step.
