Is XEN kernel an answer to VMWare crash?

[Ted Kaczmarek]

On Sun, 2005-09-25 at 11:12 -0300, George N. White III wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Sep 2005, Jarkko Elfving wrote:
> 
> > I've tried to compile VMWare to FC4 in kernel 2.6.12-1.1447_FC4 but it
> > stalls everything while it tries to start up networking. X does not get
> > any actions or commands, keyboard and mouse are not working - cold boot
> > is the only way get it back in to life and VMWare module must be skip
> > manually on boot up (and then of course remove from starting service
> > list).
> >
> > Now I've read little about XEN kernels and did not get the point of it.
> > I figure out that XEN is some kind of Virtual Machine kernel itself (I
> > mean, I can boot in other OS within using Linux - or something like
> > that). Or am I right at all?
> >
> > I was thinking would the XEN kernel be the answer to VMWare crash?
> >
> > Please help me on this...
> 
> VMWare and XEN are represent different approaches.  They are not
> interchangeable.  Without hardware support "announced" by AMD and Intel, 
> XEN does not handle certain OS's that can be used with VMWare.
> 
> -- 
> George N. White III  <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>

The VT hardware is supposedly going to be shipping this quarter, their
is quite a bit of it out in dev labs already,  as far as for Linux
guests xen 2.X is great for people who do not need smp guests, the 3.0
version supports smp guests but is not production ready.

The amount of contribution into Xen from AMD, HP, IBM, Intel, Redhat,
Suse and Unisys and other would lead me to believe that one choosing
this path will not be disappointed. 

AFAIK VMWare does not have any where near the functionality of what Xen
3.0 is going to have. I don't think anyone should expect any non Linux
or BSD based guests for quite a long time, but stranger things have
happened.

Now that where on this, I hope some rpms come out based on a more recent
changeset soon :-) Not a big deal for me but many users could sure use
many of the existing bug fixes.


Regards,
Ted