[9fans] xen port?

[9fans] xen port?

[George Michaelson]

Xen just got ported to NetBSD, so I have hopes I can have plan9 on my dell L400
which is otherwise not viable (ATI Mobility chipset)

can I get a brief sitrep on xen? 

cheers
	-george

Re: [9fans] xen port?

[Leo Caves]

ggm@apnic.net (George Michaelson) wrote in message news:<20040318091052.66c7ec8d@as-tech-l.apnic.net>...
>
> can I get a brief sitrep on xen? 
> 

Xen looks interesting:   
to save a google:  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/

Xen appears to be a mulitplexer for (appropriately ported) operating
systems(?)  Plan9 and inferno are so light-weight, you can imagine
instances being created in a thread-like manner.

It might be an interesting route for providing secure services ("have
a whole machine - its yours!"), but quite a different model from (say)
a name-space protected sandbox on plan9/inferno.

Also, inferno (emu) is (already) a virtual OS.  Would Xen offer any
advantages over multiple inferno instances hosted on a conventional
OS?

I am interested to hear opinion on what xen might offer in the Plan
9/inferno world-view.


Leo
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-- 
Dennis Davis, BUCS, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
D.H.Davis@bath.ac.uk

Re: [9fans] xen port?

[ron minnich]

On Fri, 19 Mar 2004, Leo Caves wrote:

> I am interested to hear opinion on what xen might offer in the Plan
> 9/inferno world-view.

my one interest was that I could run auth, fs, and term on one laptop.

ron

Re: [9fans] xen port?

[Martin C.Atkins]

On Fri, 19 Mar 2004 07:52:30 -0700 (MST) ron minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov> wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Mar 2004, Leo Caves wrote:
> 
> > I am interested to hear opinion on what xen might offer in the Plan
> > 9/inferno world-view.
> 
> my one interest was that I could run auth, fs, and term on one laptop.
> 
> ron
> 

Does Xen virtualise the display? I couldn't see anything that suggested
it did in a 10-minute parse of the website, but then I couldn't find anything
that said it didn't either!

If it doesn't, it wouldn't make a very good platform for a term!
But I suppose you could do auth+fs+drawterm instead.

(BTW: you should already be able to do the above using VMware, but
you would need lots of physical memory, and the performance might not
be very exciting!)

Martin
PS
  Hello Leo! :-)
-- 
Martin C. Atkins			martin@parvat.com
Parvat Infotech Private Limited		http://www.parvat.com{/,/martin}

Re: [9fans] xen port?

[andrey mirtchovski]

> (BTW: you should already be able to do the above using VMware, but
> you would need lots of physical memory, and the performance might not
> be very exciting!)

everybody's doing virtualization in grids nowadays -- that's the only
way they can have a secure environment when they don't have the luxury
of being able to access private namespaces.

many of the papers accepted to IPDPS'04 and CCGrid'04 are looking for
solutions exactly in that area.  rumour is globus has even got
improvements in vmware, something like binaries running at 20% native
speed was considered an good speed.

andrey

Re: [9fans] xen port?

[ron minnich]

On Sat, 20 Mar 2004, Martin C.Atkins wrote:

> Does Xen virtualise the display? I couldn't see anything that suggested
> it did in a 10-minute parse of the website, but then I couldn't find anything
> that said it didn't either!

not sure, but maybe that is not impossible to add.

ron

Re: [9fans] xen port?

[George Michaelson]

On Fri, 19 Mar 2004 07:52:30 -0700 (MST) ron minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov> wrote:

>On Fri, 19 Mar 2004, Leo Caves wrote:
>
>> I am interested to hear opinion on what xen might offer in the Plan
>> 9/inferno world-view.
>
>my one interest was that I could run auth, fs, and term on one laptop.
>
>ron

Me three. and, get around non-supported h/w by using a virtual machine instance
which would be a longterm port available across changing pee cee hardware.

xens website claims to reveal a lot of the underlying machine speed-wise.
It may depend what you compare it to.

-George

Re: [9fans] xen port?

[Russ Cox]

George Michaelson wrote:

>On Fri, 19 Mar 2004 07:52:30 -0700 (MST) ron minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>On Fri, 19 Mar 2004, Leo Caves wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>I am interested to hear opinion on what xen might offer in the Plan
>>>9/inferno world-view.
>>>      
>>>
>>my one interest was that I could run auth, fs, and term on one laptop.
>>
>>ron
>>    
>>
>
>Me three. and, get around non-supported h/w by using a virtual machine instance
>which would be a longterm port available across changing pee cee hardware.
>  
>

it all depends on their driver support.  they do ether
but punt on video.  since ethernet drivers are becoming
more and more trivial while video is the real stumbling block,
it's not clear that xen is so useful.

as for running auth server, fs, and terminal on one laptop,
just do it natively -- you don't need three separate kernels
anyway, as long as fs == fossil.

russ