Re: [RFC] Virtualization steps

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

Dave Hansen wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-03-25 at 04:33 +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:
>> Oh, after you come to an agreement and start posting patches, can you
>> also outline why we want this in the kernel (what it does that low
>> level virtualization doesn't, etc, etc) 
> 
> Can you wait for an OLS paper? ;)
> 
> I'll summarize it this way: low-level virtualization uses resource
> inefficiently.
> 
> With this higher-level stuff, you get to share all of the Linux caching,
> and can do things like sharing libraries pretty naturally.
> 
> They are also much lighter-weight to create and destroy than full
> virtual machines.  We were planning on doing some performance
> comparisons versus some hypervisors like Xen and the ppc64 one to show
> scaling with the number of virtualized instances.  Creating 100 of these
> Linux containers is as easy as a couple of shell scripts, but we still
> can't find anybody crazy enough to go create 100 Xen VMs.

But these require a modified O/S, do they not? Or do I read that 
incorrectly? Is this going to be real virtualization able to run any O/S?

Frankly I don't see running 100 VMs as a realistic goal, being able to 
run Linux, Windows, Solaris and BEOS unmodified in 4-5 VMs would be far 
more useful.
> 
> Anyway, those are the things that came to my mind first.  I'm sure the
> others involved have their own motivations.
> 
> -- Dave
>