Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 28 Mar 2006 10:52:06 +0200 | From | Herbert Poetzl <> | Subject | Re: [RFC] Virtualization steps |
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On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 11:28:12PM -0500, Bill Davidsen wrote: > 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?
Xen requires slighly modified kernels, while e.g. Linux-VServer only uses a _single_ kernel for all virtualized guests ...
> 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.
well, that largely depends on the 'use' ...
I don't think that vps providers like lycos would be very happy if they had to multiply the ammount of machines they require by 10 or 20 :)
and yes, running 100 and more Linux-VServers on a single machine _is_ realistic ...
best, Herbert
> >Anyway, those are the things that came to my mind first. I'm sure the > >others involved have their own motivations. > > > >-- Dave > > - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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