LinuxWorld: Stronger I/O & VM Coming Soon to Linux 37
Mark Brunelli, News Editor writes "Tim Witham, CTO of Open Source Development Labs and a featured speaker at LinuxWorld, says the next Linux kernel will feature improved input/output and virtualization capabilities. Said Witham: 'Enabling virtualization is a big win [for Linux 2.6] as it allows IT shops to start their development cycles for a technology they will be looking at deploying within the next year or so. There has been lots of good work done with regard to system scalability, memory management, disk I/O, process and thread scalability. Also, work done for availability, like a greatly improved multi-path I/O [were victories].'"
Content-free (Score:5, Informative)
Terrible title (Score:2, Interesting)
'VM', in the context of the Linux kernel, refers to its virtual memory manager, not virtual machines. It's incredibly misleading to read about 'stronger VM' like this.
Wasn't usermode Linux integrated into the 2.6 kernel anyway? What improvements in virtualisation is TFA referring to? It seemed remarkably short on details.
Re:Terrible title (Score:3, Insightful)
User Mode Linux is in 2.6, however, I believe they are referring to "Xen" which is a separate "
Re:Terrible title (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Terrible title (Score:2, Insightful)
No Xen cannot virtualize/host any OS.
Instead the OS must be modified to support it. If you look at the Xen homepage [cam.ac.uk] you'll see more details.
Whilst this doesn't diminish the usefulness of the project it does mean you cannot host an XP installation - like you can with Qemu [bellard.free.fr] , or the commerical software VMWare.
I have used Qemu extensively in the past to host installations of Windows upon my Debian machine [debian-adm...ration.org] - whilst it is not as fast as Xen promises to be it is the best around at the moment (short of spendin
Also according to their info... (Score:3, Informative)
So, whilst you are correct it cannot virtualize any OS on current processors, that is not quite the same as saying it can't virtualize any OS in the future, which is what I was referring to. Apologies on my part if I wasn't clear on that - I'm not always as clear as I could be.
How does this affect me? (Score:1)
Some thoughts (Score:3, Interesting)
Improved I/O means home networks should run closer to the capabilities of the wire, plus multimedia on the computer is less likely to stall when playing. It may also make Linux more attractive to games writers, as a lot of games these days are heavy on multimedia.
What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway? (Score:4, Informative)
I used to think this would go away with faster machines, or the interrupts would be freed by using SCSI HBA's, but the symptoms still persist today, even on a modern 'fast' machine.
I never experienced anything like it on, say, Sun hardware, in the pre-Linux days.
Re:What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway? (Score:3, Informative)
DMA should stop this from happening (I wonder if it happens outside X86)
Re:What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway? (Score:2)
Re:What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway? (Score:1)
Re:What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway? (Score:1)
(This post is a joke, inci [wikipedia.org]
Re:What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway? (Score:2)
I find even file manager slower under windows vs xcopy.
Just curious,
Enjoy.
Re:What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway? (Score:1)
Re:What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway? (Score:2)
When I cp a 2+gig file to a different partion (ext3 to fat32) the system acts sluggish and I can't play games or compile with any responsiveness. It could be the filesystem layer, but I don't buy it.
When I burn a CD iso (XCDRoast), I have no responsiveness problems playing Cube/Privateer or anything else. Go figure.
Its still better I/O than Windows though. Install Open Office from a windows share, install an another application
Re:What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway? (Score:1)
Re:What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway? (Score:1)
Re:What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway? (Score:2)
Why would you say that? My Windows (2000) is lean and clean. My hardware is also different from yours.
I'm copying ~10 gig Virtual PC file to another drive and writing this message, playing MP3 from same drive I'm copying (with MWP), using SSH-client and even compiling C#.NET application at the same time. No responsiveness problems, no locking-up or anything.
Im also running a PIII with 256 Meg of RAM. Are you? I didn't buy this computer with the intention of runn
Re:What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway? (Score:1)
My program works on Linux, FreeBSD and Windows without
Re:What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway? (Score:3, Insightful)
May be what the Linux community needs (Score:1)
Re:May be what the Linux community needs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:May be what the Linux community needs (Score:3, Informative)
Which next kernel? (Score:2)
Anybody know what they're talking about when they refer to "next Linux kernel"?
Re:Which next kernel? (Score:3, Informative)
Multipathing (Score:2)
Re:Multipathing (Score:2)