Re: Merge Xen (the hypervisor) into Linux

Alan Cox
2009-06-03T17:38:17Z

On Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:31:13 -0600
"Chris Friesen" <cfriesen@nortel.com> wrote:

> 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.

Ditto some Atom cpus which in turn means you can't run kvm on all the
netbooks right now - which is one place its very useful.

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

At that point you can just use kvm anyway.