During the week of Citrix Synergy,
much of the Xen community was looking to the news coming out of the
show around what Citrix and its ecosystem of partners were doing within
the XenServer, XenDesktop, and cloud computing
markets. However, there was an interesting event that may have been
overlooked by the Xen community during that time. With news coming out
about Linux 3.0, it was also announced that all key Xen code had been
finally accepted into the Linux mainline kernel after almost eight years
since Xen's first release.
For years, Oracle, Citrix, and other
members of the Xen.org community have been undertaking numerous efforts
to fully integrate the various components of the open source Xen
technology into the Linux mainline kernel so that each of the Linux
distribution vendors could fully support and enable Xen in their
solutions without requiring additional work and effort on their part or
that of their users. It is that struggle that seems to have finally
reached a conclusion.
According to the latest news, the Linux mainline tree (2.6.39+) now
contains literally every component needed for Linux to run both as a
management domain kernel (Dom0) and as a guest (DomU).
Oracle's
senior vice president of Linux and virtualization engineering, Wim
Coekaerts explained things in a bit more detail within a recent Oracle blog post:
Xen
has always used Linux as the management OS (Dom0) on top of the
hypervisor itself, to do the device management and control of the
virtual machines running on top of Xen. And for many years, next to the
hypervisor, there was a substantial linux kernel patch that had to be
applied on top of a linux kernel to transform into this "Dom0". This
code had to constantly be kept in sync with the progress Linux itself
was making and as such caused a substantial amount of extra work that
had to be done.
...MORE
Read the rest of this InfoWorld Virtualization Report article.