Re: [9fans] can't send mail, sometimes

[Lucio De Re <lucio@proxima.alt.za>]

> but taking in account all the efforts done by Ron and others on
> supporting virtual machines, i suppose is better to use qemu, xen,
> lguest, etc. and provide them with feedback.

The philosophy here varies from the pragmatism of what works so that I
can have what I need (VMware server works almost adequately on top of
Ubuntu Feisty, practically out of the box) to what is good for human
kind (Xen has lost direction and is trying to become VMware, lguest
looks promising, specially as Rusty seems to have a direct beeline to
Linus, but it's too closely coupled to Linux, etc., and you need an
army of elves to track either) with numerous shades of grey in
between.

Then, there is my personal desire to, preferably, have a virtualiser
lying below the operating system (no host "domain" - did I mention
that I'll never get over the initial aversion to Xen that stemmed from
needing Python to get it to work?) or, if nothing else applies, to
make Plan 9 the host OS and, in either case, standardising on the Plan
9 device driver model for all Open Source operating systems.

There I think Xen has a point, maybe lguest also does: Xen is
certainly compelling all OSOS developers to relook at the platform and
Machine Independence in a new light.  For that, I believe we ought to
thank VMware, but Xen is effectively twisting everybody's arm.

Not that this subtracts anything from Ron's efforts, quite the
contrary, but the broader the scope, the more likely we are to come up
with a generic solution.  One that resembles what IBM did right more
than thirty years ago.

++L