Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 06 Sep 2005 16:13:05 GMT
I finally have Xen 2.0.7 booting on my home test server. Xen is an open-source virtualization system, sort of like VMWare. I've been half-heartedly trying to get it to work on this system since March, but the hardware is a bit weird, and Xen versions before 2.0.6 didn't want to boot at all on it. I could get the Xen 2.0.6 CD to boot, mostly, but it kept dying with weird errors when I tried to boot from the hard drive, and I didn't have enough time to debug it. Xen 2.0.7 finally seems to work right.
I'm planning on setting up a couple virtual machines today, hopefully everything will keep working. I need a couple test hosts for various Typo-related activities, plus some development space for my little virtualization project.
Tags msirs480, virtualization, xen | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 06 Apr 2005 14:10:19 GMT
I finally have Xen working on a system at home. I hadn’t expected this to be very difficult, but apparently Xen doesn’t like my new Athlon 64 system (bought mostly for running Xen). They’ll fix it eventually, but for now I’m using an old Athlon 700 system that I had sitting around. It needed a new CPU fan (just try finding Slot A fans these days!), but I was able to scrounge up 512 MB of RAM and an 80 GB hard drive, so it’s perfectly usable.
I built a couple quick disk images and booted them under Xen, and everything worked as expected. This is always a good sign, and it suggests that I’ll be able to make progress on my little virtual-server project without a whole lot of trouble.
Posted in Xen, LWVS | Tags linux, virtualization, xen | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Laird
Sat, 13 Nov 2004 01:39:11 GMT
CNet has a summary of AMD’s latest analyst meeting, including details on future chips:
On the high end, AMD will release chips with two processing cores in 2005 and then follow in 2006 with chips based around a new chip core code-named Pacifica.
The company is relatively tight-lipped about Pacifica, but said it will be a dual-core chip that also contains virtualization technology–which allows a computer to run multiple OSes–and a security technology called Presidio. Pacifica will appear in desktops, notebooks and servers in 2006. AMD says it will also come out with a new ultra low-power chip for notebooks.
The article also mentions that Intel has been talking about virtualization lately. Considering that PCs have been fighting with virtualization since the 386 was first introduced, I’m amazed that it’s taken 20 years to get full-blown virtualization support in mainstream PC chips. Anyone who’s been around PCs for a while remembers the whole mess with 386–they could run multiple DOS programs at the same time, given a decent vm86 environment, like Desqview or Windows/386–but as soon as you tried to run something that needed 286- or 386-specific features, the whole house of cards came tumbling down, because the 386 couldn’t virtualize itself. Neither could the 486, Pentium, or any of the other x86 chips that have shown up since then.
Of course, we’re better at cheating now: programs like VMWare and Xen have shown that it isn’t really that hard to work around the CPU’s virtualization problems, but you end up paying a price. With VMWare, it’s performance; with Xen it’s patching the guest OSes to not use specific CPU instructions.
Even once that CPU’s been virtualized, the hardest part remains: virtualizing the rest of the machine. Xen’s approach is very open-source centric: they require the guest OS to be ported to Xen, including Xen-specific drivers, rather then emulate specific PC hardware in the virtual machine monitor. Long-term, that’s probably the most reasonable way to handle things, at least in the open-source world.
I’m looking forward to AMD’s new offerings. Pity we have to wait more then a year for them.
Posted in Xen, Computer Hardware | Tags amd, hardware, k9, virtualization | 1 comment
