The Xen open source virtual machine.

My machine is an AMD athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ on an Asus A8N-E motherboard, with a sorry Phoenix Bios. No virtualization access from the BIOS and /proc/cpuinfo does not show the vmx option. It does have pae.

My machine was just upgraded from fedora core 5 to 6, and based on the following, I need to yum install the latest Xen: 

rpm -qa | grep xen
xen-3.0.3-1.fc5
So I do this: 
yum erase xen
yum install xen kernel-xen virt-manager
This cleans up a number of old packages, and gets me libvirt in a new form (but not libvirt-devel, which I don't expect to need anyway). Now I reboot into the Xen kernel. First worry is that it does not find an nvidia kernel module (I get mine from livna) for the xen kernel, so my dual head nvidia GeForce card won't work (it does fall back nicely into single head though, which is nice). I now have a /sys/hpervisor directory, so I look at /sys/hypervisor/properties/capabilities and there are no hvm entries (bummer), only: 
xen-3.0-x86_32p
Not having dual head is a serious liability, so I set grub to NOT boot the Xen kernel and reboot into my non-Xen world for now.

At this point (this point being November 2006), Xen does not support Windows operating systems, at least not without an Intel processor and the VT mechanism, in which case you can run Windows XP. The AMD virtualization mechanism (Pacifica)is not yet supported, and is only available in the very latest (2006) AMD processors.

To get high performance out of Xen, it expects that the operating system running under Xen has been ported to run on Xen. One scheme is to run a special fedora under fedora just to handle sendmail for added security (as one example), not to mention the possibility of test flying new linux releases.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org