Re: Re: Vertualization of Unmodified Operating Systems

[Dave Feustel <dfeustel@mindspring.com>]

On Saturday 15 April 2006 17:53, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> On Sat, 15 Apr 2006 17:39:10 -0500, Dave Feustel wrote:
> 
> > AMD Pacifica and Intel's VT make possible the virtualization of unmodified
> > operating systems. Is it still necessary to add code to the hypervisor to
> > support specific operating systems, or can Xen, as written, support any
> > arbitrary OS that successfully boots on a PC? (I'm thinking of the BSDs
> > here).
> 
> This sort of thing has been addressed here before. 

I know this and I appreciate your patience. I definitely don't
pick things up or figure things out as quickly now as I did 
when I was younger.

> While theoritically, 
> VT and SVM ought to allow any OS to run under Xen, in practice, if an OS
> hasn't been tested as a guest under Xen, it is likely to turn up some bugs
> or incompleteness.  Over time, this will certainly be a less of an issue.
> 
> The problem has to do with the fact that different OS's will use different
> instructions when accessing things like page tables.  Right now, Xen only
> emulates the instructions that we know are used by the systems we test
> with (things like Linux and certain versions of Windows).

Xen and OpenBSD running under Xen are rapidly rising to the top of my list
of things to work with as general availability of AM2-socket motherboards and 
revision F AMD64 chips approaches. Xen and hardware virtualization have been
for a while now at the very top of the list of topics I follow in the news.

Dave Feustel

> Regards,
> 
> Anthony Liguori
> 
> > Thanks,
> > Dave Feustel
> 
> 
> 
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