Fedora And Virtualization

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Tom Horsley <tom.horsley at att.net> said:
> True. The xen paravirtualization is indeed fast, but needs kernel
> support in the VM with a paravirt aware kernel, which you can get for
> linux kernels (sometimes, depending on the current state of
> patches)

I think all the paravirt kernel patches are upstream now.  Fedora has
been shipping paravirt-capable kernels for a while now, and I don't
think there are extra patches to support that.

The non-upstreamed, patches still needed piece is the Xen hypervisor
itself.  That's the part that Fedora has _not_ shipped for a while, due
to the workload of trying to maintain patches against current kernels.

The nice thing about Xen (vs. KVM) is that when a paravirt OS is
available (e.g. almost any Open Source OS), you don't need any special
hardware to get a near-full-speed virtual host.  With KVM, you must have
a CPU with virtualization extensions supported and enabled.  AMD leaves
hardware-virt out of a few of the low-end CPUs, and Intel a few more.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.