This is actually incorrect. There is no kernel sharing taking place in Xen.
I'd recommend anyone interested in Xen to check out their documentation and
technical papers. It's actually a lot closer to the hypervisor-approach for
virtual machines than one might expect at first glance.
It's basically a small, specialized hypervisor-alike 'kernel' running on the
bare hardware, providing services to guest instances. There is always a first
guest running in the unrestricted domain (dom0), and additional guests can
either be in the unrestricted domain e.g. if they need direct access to some
hardware, or in the user domain (domU). Each guests runs its own Linux kernel,
and is in fact it own Linux installation. The only requirement is that the
kernel is a patched version. When you compile Xen, it create dom0 and domU
kernels for you to use in guests.
That's really a very summarized description though. Again, I recommend looking
at the docs and tech papers if you want to know more.
Kris
On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 11:03:20AM -0600, Tom Shilson wrote:
> Xen is a Linux form of VMWare. It allows you to run multiple instances of
> Linux. Instead of creating a virtual machine, however, Xen shares the
> kernel. Compared to VMWare (or zVM) it is limited because of this. I have
> never used it. I believe that it is an OpenSource project.
>
> tom
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
