Quoting IT Jungle

The commercial variant of the Ubuntu Linux distribution will be updated by Canonical today, including both a new desktop and server distribution at release 7.04. Ubuntu is, of course, itself an offshoot of the Debian Linux distro, which is just about to release its own update, code-named "Etch."

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Ubuntu 7.04 based on the Linux 2.6.20 kernel and has support for the new quad-core processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices and can also make sure of the on-chip virtualization support features called VT and AMD-V, respectively, from those vendors' most recent X64 processors. The standard kernel in Ubuntu 7.04 supports up to eight processor cores in a single system image on either a desktop or server box, and with the BigSMP kernel extensions, it can span up to 64 cores, just like other Linuxes.

As far as other virtualization goes, Ubuntu 7.04 is supported as a guest environment for VMware's various virtualization products, including GSX Server 2.X, VMware Server, ESX Server 2.X, and ESX Server 3.0; Canonical has worked with VMware to ensure that Ubuntu 7.04 is also certified as a host environment for ESX Server as well. Ubuntu 7.04 also has support for a relatively new virtual machine hypervisor called Kernel Virtual Machine, or KVM, which is now part of the Linux kernel and which makes use of the VT and AMD-V features to provide virtual machine partitions for different Linux distributions; KVM requires a modified version of the QEMU hypervisor. The KVM hypervisor support is a technical preview, but it is woven into the kernels that come as part of Ubuntu 7.04.

Ubuntu 7.04 does not feature integrated support for the Xen virtual machine hypervisor from XenSource, but it is getting close. (The Debian "Sarge" 3.1 distribution could support Xen, but Xen itself and the underlying chip hardware have been changing so fast in the past year that it has been hard to offer out-of-the-box support.) Red Hat has only a few weeks ago delivered integrated Xen support with Enterprise Linux 5, and Novell probably jumped the gun last July with Xen support in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. The Ubuntu Foundation is just starting to work with the OpenVZ project set up by SWsoft to open source its Virtuozzo virtual server hypervisor. (With a virtual machine hypervisor, each virtual machine is loaded with a complete operating system, while with a virtual server environment, multiple operating systems are put in software sandboxes but share a single kernel and file system.) Both Xen and OpenVZ support are available through an Ubuntu repository as an add-on to Ubuntu 7.04.

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