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Novell To Ship Xen in Next Version of Suse

Posted by Hemos on Fri Mar 11, 2005 09:45 AM
from the virtual-shipping dept.
Businesses SuSE Linux Business Novell
daria42 writes "The next version of SuSE, to be shipped in mid-April, will ship with the Xen virtualization software, letting users run multiple versions of the operating system simultaneously, the company said on Thursday. The article says that Red Hat has also begun adding Xen support to Fedora."
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Novell To Ship Xen in Next Version of Suse 50 Comments More /

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  • How does Xen compare to User Mode Linux? They appear to scratch a similar itch, but has anyone tried out both to compare?

    • Re:What about UML? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Chirs (87576) on Friday March 11 2005, @10:06AM (#11910074)
      Xen can be significantly faster due to the difference in how it works.

      UML is a port of the kernel to a "POSIX architecture" so that it runs in userspace.

      Xen is a port of the kernel to a quasi-x86 architecture (basically x86 with some non-virtualizable instructions removed). This means that most of the time Xen is running directly on the hardware.
    • Xen outperforms [cam.ac.uk] UML. At least on applications that heavily work the OS.

    • Re:What about UML? (Score:5, Informative)

      by vertigo (341) on Friday March 11 2005, @10:19AM (#11910202) Homepage
      I have. I have a single computer acting as my local home server (a p3-500 with 512mb ram). This machine acts as a linux desktop, development machine, it handles my mail and web stuff, and it acts as a shells-server sandbox for a friend who uses it to test his code on. Some of these things are mutually exclusive (I like to run debian stable for mail+web, while my development stuff is bleeding edge). Also, it is handy for said friend to have root access in order to be able to install needed packages. With a VM he can have a sandbox to freely play around in without having it affect my system in any way.

      As a result, i have a base system for my desktop (currently running Ubuntu Hoary), and on top of that are 3 VM's: one for mail, one for web, one for shells. The filesystems are stored in containerfiles, so they are very easy to backup. Until a couple of months ago I used User Mode Linux for these VM's, but UML development doesn't seem to progress very much and performance wasn't optimal, to say the least. Because of this, I switched to Xen and I've been very happy with the results. Setting is very easy. Compared to UML, Xen is _much_ faster. I haven't noticed any overhead from Xen, both the host system and the individual VM's seem to operate at native or near native speed, while UML (even with skas etc) took a very noticable performance hit. Development seems very active, tracking the newest kernels. Also, the management tools are really nice. Setup of the network was much easier for me than with UML, every VM automatically creates ports for the console, and there's is additional web management that makes managing the VM's really friendly. All in all, if you have any interest in playing with this stuff, I would very much recommend Xen.

    • Re:What about UML? (Score:5, Informative)

      by gtrubetskoy (734033) * on Friday March 11 2005, @10:26AM (#11910292) Homepage
      How does Xen compare to User Mode Linux?

      Xen is going to be a much better performer than UML. However, if you need maximum performance and are OK with running only one operating system (Linux), consider Linux VServer [linux-vserver.org]. It gives you most of the functionality of "virtualization" (even though it's not true virtualization since there is only _one_ kernel running on the machine) - a complete "virtual server" appearance with essentially no overhead.

      There are numerous advantages to the VServer approach (a.k.a. as Zones on Solaris and Jails on FreeBSD, BTW), such as the ability to access the filesystem from host (very useful for backups), ability to view/control the virtual server processes from host, single VM and IO across all virtual servers thus providing much better optimization. The performance is stunning - you just don't feel "virtualized".

      Linux VServer isn't backed by major universities and Microsoft Research [cam.ac.uk] and thus unfortunately does not get the publicity, even though it is one of the most revolutionary projects out there IMHO. I hope it becomes part of vanilla kernel some time soon.

    • See one of my recent journal entries.

      For my uses for my Internet server, Xen has proven an _order of magnitude_ better performing than UML, although there were some other changes that helped (going from file-backed filesystems to partitions for each Xen domain). But even without that, in practise, in most every day loads, the performance overhead of Xen compared to native is only around 2%, where the overhead of UML+skas3 is greater than 50%.

      The Xen website has a performance comparison which has been inde

  • Good Idea! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by elemur (7613) on Friday March 11 2005, @09:50AM (#11909904)
    The virtualization software makes it much easier to build task-focused servers, helping add more security to your environment... with very low overhead.

    Has anybody done a 1-to-1 comparison between Solaris Zones and the features that Xen provides? The Solaris setup is really very easy.. you can have a custom environment booted and running in a few minutes..

    I will say that Xen is impressive, given its benchmarks posted.. it shows a very efficient virtualization engine.

    • Has anybody done a 1-to-1 comparison between Solaris Zones and the features that Xen provides?

      They're completely different technologies. Short summary: Xen is para-virtualisation, Zones are a kernel abstraction.

      With Solaris zones there is a single kernel. The process structure has been extended with a zone ID, so the kernel knows which zone each process belongs to. Solaris boots normally and becomes the master. Then each slave zone boots inside the master. Zone filesystems are simply subdirectories

  • Without Windows, not too helpful... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by datastalker (775227) on Friday March 11 2005, @09:51AM (#11909918) Homepage
    Of course, I understand the licensing and freedom restrictions about using Windows under such a program, but without being able to use Windows with it, I'm gonna have to stick with VMware.

    I can see the uses for it, but right now, those don't align with what I need, and I suspect that will hold true for many others as well.

    Even still, it's cool technology.

    • I almost wonder if this isn't so much an effort to compete with VMware or Wine or whatever, but rather an effort to compete with Sun's N1 Grid computing. Sun boasts a lot about running different apps in different containers, etc., which is something Jonathan Schwartz likes to claim Linux can't do. It appears that now SuSE (and soon Fedora) *can* do that out of the box.

    • Re:Without Windows, not too helpful... (Score:5, Informative)

      by rca66 (818002) on Friday March 11 2005, @09:59AM (#11910000)
      Of course, I understand the licensing and freedom restrictions about using Windows under such a program,

      It has only technical reasons, that windows is not supported. From the Xen FAQ ( http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/faq .html#a1.4 [cam.ac.uk]):

      Unfortunately we do not currently support Windows; the paravirtualized approach we use to get such high performance has not been usable directly for Windows to date. However recently announced hardware support from Intel and AMD will allow us to transparently support Windows XP & 2003 Server in the near future. We are working on this and intend to have support available by the time the new processors are available.

      • But they also state elsewhere [cam.ac.uk] in their documentation, that operating systems must be ported to run on Xen. Obviously this would be impossible to achieve with Windows, as the source code is not available.

        If I understand it correctly, the big problem is that the X86 architecture was designed without this sort of thing in mind, so it is difficult to get it to work well without making changes to the operating system. The new 64-bit architecture addresses this limitation.

  • LOL? I want WOL. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Quixote (154172) * on Friday March 11 2005, @09:57AM (#11909986) Homepage Journal
    Linux-on-Linux (or, for that matter, Unix-on-Linux) is interesting in its own right (think shared hosting), but I want Windows-on-Linux for the occasional Windows app, as well as to just play around.

    It is interesting to see that Microsoft earlier supported Xen, but then later pulled support. Their (Xen's) homepage still mentions having received support from Microsoft Research.

    --
    Does MSN censor search results? [buffalo.edu]

    • This is multiple Linuxes running on a VMM: Virtual Machine Monitor. The Linuxes run side by side, none run inside each other.

      The technique takes advantage of the multiple rings (0-3) on Intel. Normally Linux (and other kernels) run on ring 0, but with Xen the Xen VMM runs on ring 0 while Linux and other guest OSs run on ring 1, while user-mode programs continue to run on ring 3.
  • How does Opensource software Xen measure up to other virtualization software like VMWare and others I even do not know? Are there more anyway?

    • Re:benchmarks (Score:4, Informative)

      by Chirs (87576) on Friday March 11 2005, @10:09AM (#11910099)
      It's faster, but with current hardware it needs support from the guest OS. You basically need to build the guest kernel to run within Xen.

      This is fairly straightforward for open-source OS's, but is why you can't currently run windows on top of Xen.
  • SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 also adds the Linphone software for voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP); the Firefox Web browser; and the F-Spot photo organizer software. And it comes with the latest versions of graphical interface software, Gnome 2.10 and KDE 3.4.

    They're planning on shipping KDE 3.4 when it's released, or they're including the current RC?

    • As SuSE 9.3 is planned to be released around middle of April and KDE 3.4 is due next week IIRC and KDE usually meets its planned release dates quite accurately for such a large project I assume it will have KDE 3.4 final. SuSE usually supplies RPMs of new KDE versions (sometimes even betas and RCs) for the last 2-3 versions of their distro inside 2-3 days after release, sometimes even on the same day.

      I wish they would do the same for Gnome.
      • They do that because SuSE has a load of people on staff that work on KDE. Not so with gnome.

        Which has, much to my chagrin, made KDE the preferred SuSE desktop, making us SuSE gnome users feel a little shunted-off.
    • They're planning on shipping KDE 3.4 when it's released, or they're including the current RC?

      KDE 3.4 is scheduled for March 16th and AFAIK the packages are basically done. So I guess they won't have problems shipping KDE 3.4 final mid-April, especially since they surely have used the Betas and RCs in their distribution betas...

  • Licensing Cost (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dduardo (592868) on Friday March 11 2005, @10:03AM (#11910050)
    Does this mean you have to pay extra for each instance of suse you run under Xen?
      • True, there is no license fee for 'core' Linux, but if you run any of the VAR components of distribution X, there might be some licensing issues.

  • A distro added a package. Why is this being reported on slashdot?

    • To piss off people like you (Score:5, Funny)

      by A nonymous Coward (7548) * on Friday March 11 2005, @10:44AM (#11910503)
      See, there's a vast uber-wing conspiracy among the internautti to waste the time of hard working productive people like yourself, who have so little time during the day for keeping up to date that they don't have time to read headlines, only stories, and thus when you read the story directly and find you have wasted your time, and then post on slashdot to complain about it, the internautti cackle with glee at another success story.

      The answer, of course, is to read the headlines first, not read the stories just because they are available, and not play the internautti's game. Eventually, if such a radical notion spreads far and wide, or even short and narrow, the internautti will be disillusioned and find some other amusement.
    • lots of distros are adding support for xen or at least have plans to. Xen support is supposed to be merged into the kernel in the near future as well. Also, big boys like IBM are starting to show lots of interest in Xen... my point is it's a significant trend where as a few months ago most people were still saying "wtf is xen? those aliens from HL2?"
  • A good use for this sort of thing is letting normal users onto a pc without making a mess of it, think:

    "Xen and the art of computer maintanance"
    • This is mentioned on their roadmap. On 3.0, you'll be able to fork a VM, let a luser loose on it, and then just throw it away along with all the crap they've managed to infect it with.
  • I fully understand a usefulness of linux on linux, as well as other virtualizations.

    That said, when can I get WINE or something similar working sufficiently so the few things that keep me having a windows box around can fade away? I'm not even talking games - I really just need audiblemanager and itunes running. Neither of these should be hard at all.

    I'm almost tempted to buy a mac mini just so I can get this functionality without the windows factor.
    • iTunes already works in Wine. There has been some significant development to get it working more smoothly lately, especially in Crossover Office, but also in the vanilla Wine tree. No idea about the other app you mentioned, I've never heard of it, but it's probably worth giving it a whirl in Wine.
    • To summarize your comment:
      "So project X is doing fine, but why can't project Y do what I want it to?"

      For someone who's .sig describes himself as a 'free software enthusiast', you sure don't seem to understand how the free software world works.

      Ever heard of 'Scratching an itch', etc?
  • I fully understand the reasons why Xen doesn't run Windows as a guest operating system, but I still find it a damn shame. It could be the perfect open source replacement for VMWare, and it would make a hell of a lubricator for Windows-to-Linux migration projects.
  • as several features, notably any APM or ACPI power management at all, don't work with Xen at the moment.
      • > Well, why would you want power management on a virtual machine? the host machine should manage the power...

        Never used Xen, have you? You have to run a Xen-patched kernel as the HOST system, and THAT is what doesn't
        support power management. i.e. if you're running Xen, you cannot simultaneously use any power management features
        of your hardware.

    • Re:Why? (Score:4, Funny)

      by justkarl (775856) on Friday March 11 2005, @09:48AM (#11909887) Homepage
      Simple question. ("normal users").

      Sorry, who?

        • Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)

          by hey! (33014) on Friday March 11 2005, @11:59AM (#11911367) Homepage Journal
          Well, because it's fast for one thing.

          Life is about tradeoffs. One of the biggest things you give away trying to create a virutal server is speed. Xen's advantage is that it is more efficient.

          Suppose I want to run a name server and a database server, and I only have one physical box to do it on. In a sense, running them on the same machine introduces a kind of coupling. If BIND turns out to have a remote root vulnerability, my database is toast. I'd consider running under vmware, but the performance hit is big enough that I'd probably decide to live with the potential problem.

          I can imagine in the future a distro in which a separate virtual machines is used when the user decides to browse the internet or read email, provided the overhead was small. When his browser machine is rooted by spyware, they can enjoy looking at his bookmarks, because that's all they're getting. If the user screws up and installs a trojan popup extension, he can throw the entire virtual machine away and get a new one off the shelf.
    • You take 10 machines. Install 10 copies of Linux or NetBSD on each, using Xen to run them simultaneously. Then you make 10 beowulf clusters out of it.
    • Dude, your interrogative reeks of the ecological fallacy [wikipedia.org]
      Frag deine frage.

    • Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LWATCDR (28044)
      Lets you try out new distros or OS with ease.
      Allows you to partition a computer into many virtual machines.
      Want to give 10 people there own servers to play with? Just use Xen. Great for ISPs.

      The real question is what do you mean by a "normal" user. Just because you do not have a use for it and you might not does not mean that many people will. I have no use for AIM but I know some people seem to.

    • Why?

      Zen... [novell.com] Xen... [zdnet.com.au] Zen... [novell.com] Xen... [zdnet.com.au] Zen... [novell.com] Xen [zdnet.com.au]...

      Novell Marketing, the biggest bunch of punching bags in the history of the technology industry, has gotta be asking themselves, "Why us?"

    • Re:One of the benefits of xen (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mad Merlin (837387) on Friday March 11 2005, @09:51AM (#11909927) Homepage
      one of the things that xen does also help is running WINE so much better. You might get some incompatibility problems but generally it's much better.

      Also, combined with other code like emulators it can even go further than just virtualizing x86 software.

      How exactly does Linux in a VM run Wine better than Linux not in a VM?

        • Re:One of the benefits of xen (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Wudbaer (48473) on Friday March 11 2005, @10:03AM (#11910047) Homepage
          What are you talking about ? Can you elaborate or are you just throwing around some nice sounding phrases ?
        • >> How exactly does Linux in a VM run Wine better than Linux
          >> not in a VM?
          > Well separation of states and state flow for one

          Yes, but won't the impedance mismatch between the flow and the state potentially result in a performance penalty? I would think that one of the most significant properties of this environment would be that the system resource flow rate is constant in a steady-state flow system. This means there would be no accumulation of resources within any component of the syste

    • Bullshit warning (Score:5, Informative)

      by wowbagger (69688) on Friday March 11 2005, @09:59AM (#11910006) Homepage Journal
      Parent post is pure, unadulterated bullshit.

      You don't install Wine into a virtual machine any more than you install Office or HalfLife into a virtual machine.

      You install an OPERATING SYSTEM into a virtual machine, then you install applications on that OS.

      Wine is an application, no different than OpenOffice. It uses the services of the underlying operating system to do its job. The fact that its job is to provide the APIs of a foreign operating system is incidental.

      So, all that running Xen would do is to allow you to have an install of Linux or *BSD solely to run Wine - which would provide no real benefit to running Wine.

      The only way in which Xen would be of use in running Windows programs would be if Windows ran under Xen - which last time I checked it DOES NOT.

      The poster of the parent post is just trolling for stupid moderators, and obviously has already found at least one.
      • > So, all that running Xen would do is to allow you to have an > install of Linux or *BSD solely to run Wine - which would > provide no real benefit to running Wine. Well still you can do it better and get better state separation anyway but its a tradeoff of one against another. depends what you see as important.
        • G.O.A.T.

          You keep parroting the line "separation of state" - I do not think you know what that term means.

          Prove me wrong - give me a clear description of what you mean by it, and how it applies to running Wine inside a virtualized environment vs. running Wine as a process in a a non-virtualized environment.
      • Not at all what he's touting, but I could see the possibility of running the 'most WINE compatible' OS in a Xen environment, thus gaining some stability benefits.

        Think if you were running BSD - and you ran Linux inside Xen instead of using Linux compatibility. I'm not saying it would do better, but it's possible it might.

    • Re:How's this different? (Score:4, Funny)

      by PornMaster (749461) on Friday March 11 2005, @10:02AM (#11910037) Homepage
      It starts with an X, which makes it inherently cooler.
      • There's a separate root directory for each vserver, which means one can install whatever Linux distribution one wants in there, as long as the distribution doesn't depend on a special kernel (it shouldn't: near-metal operations will be done in the host kernel). Your argument is at fault here.

        There's only one kernel instance running though, which is your point I believe. Xen seems to support non-linux OSes such as FreeBSD.

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