GPL release of Virtual Iron sources

[Ben Thomas <bthomas@virtualiron.com>]

You may be aware that Virtual Iron has been working on features and
enhancements to this open source project. We've contributed changes
along the way and have always planned to contribute all of our changes
back to the community. We've reached an appropriate time to do
this. As a member of this community, we look forward to continuing to
work together to further enhance this world-class open source
hypervisor.

Our focus is the support of full virtualization on a 64 bit
hypervisor, running all flavors of guest operating systems (Linux,
Windows, 32 bit, 32 bit PAE, 64 bit, uni, SMP, etc) concurrently.  As
part of this effort, we have added many features, enhancements and
fixes to the open source code. We are releasing all of the changes to
the source code under GNU GPL license.

The system consists of several components: open source hypervisor,
para-virtualized Linux and a run-time control environment. In the
process of developing the system, whenever we could, we contributed
modifications back to the community. Some were accepted, some were not
and others could not be contributed either due to rejection of
previous patches, complexity of change, or time constraints.

Some of the more interesting features are:

- new shadow page table code (XI)

- accelerated driver support in fully virtualized user domains

- dynamic (live) user domain migration support for fully virtualized
     domains

- a modified bus architecture

- a different control plane model in domain-0 (no user accessible
     environment, no Python, no xen* daemons, etc)

While we are working to create patches for individual changes, we want
to provide access to the source code as soon as possible.  The links
below provide access to the source code, all provided under GPL. It is
broken into two components:

- source code for domain-0 and hypervisor
    See http://www.virtualiron.com/products/open_source.cfm

- source code for accelerated drivers for user domains
    See http://www.virtualiron.com/products/open_source.cfm

Moving forward, we are actively working to package our changes and
post them to the list for submission to the open source project. We
expect to be submitting changes in the coming weeks. Further, for
compatibility, it is our intent to integrate with every major point
release of the open source project.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ben Thomas                                         Virtual Iron Software
bthomas@virtualiron.com                            Tower 1, Floor 2
978-849-1214                                       900 Chelmsford Street
                                                    Lowell, MA 01851