Novell just released SuSE Linux 10.0 (previously referred as SuSE Linux Professional).
It now include Xen 3.0 technical preview (b6715) which supports AMD and Intel virtualization enhancements.
Quoting from the xen-3.0_6715-2.i586.rpm package:
Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation.
This package contains the Xen HyperVisor.
Modern computers are sufficiently powerful to use virtualization to present the illusion of many smaller virtual machines (VMs), each running a separate operating system instance. Successful partitioning of a machine to support the concurrent execution of multiple operating systems poses several challenges. Firstly, virtual machines must be isolated from one another: it is not acceptable for the execution of one to adversely affect the performance of another. This is particularly true when virtual machines are owned by mutually untrusting users. Secondly, it is necessary to support a variety of different operating systems to accommodate the heterogeneity of popular applications. Thirdly, the performance overhead introduced by virtualization should be small.
Xen uses a technique called paravirtualization: The guest OS is modified, mainly to enhance performance.The Xen hypervisor (microkernel) does not provide device drivers for your hardware (except for CPU and Memory). This job is left to the kernel that’s running in domain 0. Thus the domain 0 kernel is privileged; it has full hardware access. It’s started immediately after Xen started up. Other domains have no access to the hardware; instead they will use virtual interfaces that are provided by Xen (with the help of the domain 0 kernel).
Xen does allow to boot other Operating Systems; ports of NetBSD (Christian Limpach), FreeBSD (Kip Macy) and Plan 9 (Ron Minnich) exist.
A port of Windows XP was developed for an earlier version of Xen, but is not available for release due to licence restrictions.
In addition to this package you need to install the kernel-xen and xen-tools to use Xen.
Xen3 also support full emulation and allows to run unmodified guests, relying on hardware support. Install xen-tools-ioemu if you want to use this.
Quoting from the xen-tools-ioemu-3.0_6715-2.i586.rpm package:
Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation.
This package contains the needed BIOS and device emulation code to support unmodified guests. (You need virtualization support in hardware to make use of this.)
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