From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3e1162e60411172050317b26d@mail.gmail.com> Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 20:50:17 -0800 From: David Leimbach To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] rc dying in my drawterm on xen In-Reply-To: <5c1efca4c9647f93447d7cf0ac303d15@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <5c1efca4c9647f93447d7cf0ac303d15@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp> Topicbox-Message-UUID: 0653b902-eace-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > Sorry, I don't understand yet what is Xen. > Xen is a "virtual machine monitor". It allows you to host other operating systems, kind of similar to the way you might run many instances of VMWare on a linux/windows box but with a more "performant" implementation. Xen doesn't try to emulate too much hardware and it actually multiplexes the hardware you have. As such, you can run many different "domains" with Linux, NetBSD or Plan 9 [once Ron irons out the last few bugs...:)]. I had a Xen installation up until a few minutes ago when I hosed my machine doing something else :). Basically you use GRUB to boot Xen and then a special "Xen-linux" as a controlling "domain 0". From there you can start a xen daemon which lets you create new domains with configuration files to assign disk partitions or files as filesystems for other kernels. It's fairly cool stuff. http://xen.sf.net has some information I believe. It's also really easy to build Xen2 from source. The makefile even downloads the kernel and patches it for you IIRC so getting started is pretty easy. I'm buying extra disks just to play with it from my local mom'n'pop computer store up the street [support the little guy!!!]. Dave > Kenji > >