Re: Merge Xen (the hypervisor) into Linux

Chris Friesen
2009-06-03T17:31:37Z

Ingo Molnar wrote:

> A lot of Xen legacies could be dropped: the crazy ring1 hack on
> 32-bit, the various wide interfaces to make pure-software
> virtualization limp along. All major CPUs shipped with hardware
> virtualization support in the past 2-3 years, so the availability of
> VMX and SVM can be taken for granted for such a project.

That's a pretty bold statement. I have five x86 machines in my house
currently being used, and none of them support VMX/SVM.

At least some Lenovo laptops disable VMX in the BIOS with no way to
enable it. Some of the Core2Duo chips don't support VMX at all.

I think Xen without paravirtualization would be a serious degradation of
usefulness.

Chris