Re: [ANNOUNCE] Cooperative Linux

[Karim Yaghmour <karim@opersys.com>]

Nuno Silva wrote:
> That's xen. You can learn more here:
> 
>     http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/

For a UP system, Xen may be fine, depending on what you're trying to
do. If you're looking for a better VMware, then Xen is likely to fit
your bill. However, there are a few things to keep in mind when
looking at this sort of stuff. So, for example, Xen assumes that all
OSes are going to use the same devices for I/O: same disk, same
NIC, etc. It therefore implements lots of virtual devices for these.
But what if you wanted each OS to manage separate hardware? Also,
I'm not sure I want my OS instances to have to request memory on
a page basis with the nanokernel/monitor. Wouldn't it be just better
to reuse the existing work on the hotplug hardware (hotplug CPU,
hotplug memory, etc.) to have the kernels get/return hardware
resources to the nanokernel? Also, how generic is the virtualization
solution being examined? I've put some thought into getting a
virtualization architecture which spans UP, SMP, SMP-clusters, and
hard-rt, and wrote that down as a series of papers about Adeos. I
probably don't have the final answer, and there are probably many
things I haven't figured out in the papers I've written on the topic,
but you may want to take a look.

Karim
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