Year: 2005

primarily a rollup of fixes we have seen since the product was released to improve performance and increase scalability.
In addition, with Service Pack 1:

– Virtual Server 2005 will have host support for Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 x64 Edition (note that this does not include IA64)
– provide PXE support
– qualify Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2003 SP1as a host and as a guest
– include the Virtual Disk Precompactor, a utility that is designed to “zero out” — that is, overwrite with zeros — any available blank space on a virtual hard disk

The support for multiple instances of the operating system in SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 comes through software called Xen, an open-source package that competes with products from Microsoft and EMC’s VMware and has won big-name endorsements. Novell is adding the technology, which is useful for a number of tasks, to give programmers new abilities, said Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, director of marketing for SuSE Linux.

Xen provides a foundation called a virtual machine that an operating system thinks is a real computer. Running an operating system on such a foundation provides developers a painless way to test new software without risking damage to a primary computer. For example, they don’t have to worry that a crash will corrupt essential system files.

However, Xen is still in fairly raw form. The software will be included with the Linux version but isn’t installed by default, Mancusi-Ungaro said.

Novell announced the new Linux version at the CeBit trade show in Germany on Thursday. The cost in Europe–where SuSE Linux sales are strongest–will be 74 euros ($99), but U.S. pricing won’t be set until closer to the product launch date, Mancusi-Ungaro said.

SuSE Linux Professional is geared for desktop computer tasks such as word processing, programming or playing digital videos. Novell hopes Windows users wanting to breathe new life into older computers will be interested.

Novell will offer a “Live DVD” version that can be run directly off a DVD drive to let people experiment with but not install the software. And about eight weeks after release, an installable version will be available for free download, Mancusi-Ungaro said.

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.

The Professional product line changes more quickly and includes newer features than the company’s premium product, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Xen is “hypervisor” software that runs directly on a computer’s hardware, managing operating system access to memory, input-output subsystem and other resources. So far, Xen only can run modified versions of Linux on x86 processors such as Intel’s Pentium, but work is under way to extend it to other operating systems and processor domains.

Sebastian Biallas, PearPC’s main developers, spoke briefly and exclusively to Neowin on the release – and it looks like the group is still shaping up for its response. “There are some people who have copyright on (parts of) PearPC, and it depends on how the react on this,” he said. “The basic rule is: You either must release PearPC derivates under GPL or you must obtain a licence for other use.” Aside from that, he couldn’t comment further on it – but it looks likely there will be more movement on this from the PearPC side over the coming weeks.

There were some things that came out, the first of which was that there will be a Pacifica spec that comes out ‘before the end of the month’. Hopefully, they mean March, but it wasn’t specified as such.

The next bit was that it isn’t totally compatible with VT, or at least that is the strong impression I get. When you ask the question ‘is it compatible’, and you get the answer ‘well, isn’t the weather nice today, how long are you in SF for?’, it becomes clear that they don’t want to say no in public.

AMD did say that its version would be better because it would support all the things that make the K8 line unique. HT, embedded memory controllers, and all the bells and whistles should make for a whopping good time for all the VMM writers out there. With any luck, Pacifica will make it easier.

The last bit was how it plans to introduce it in phases. Before you can buy silicon, most likely around the end of the year, you can get all the Pacifica goodies in Linux. Those that are not gifted with a large corporation that gets alpha silicon, say EMC and MS, will get a dev kit in the form of Xen and Open Hypervisor. Open in front of Hypervisor is new to me, but in any case, you will get a plugin that enables the silicon to function when it comes out.

Xen supports virtualization of x86 hardware for complete separation of virtual machine environments with only minimal decrease in performance. NetBSD/xen can run in both privileged and unprivileged virtual machines under Xen 1.2, and in unprivileged virtual machines under Xen 2.0.

Christian Limpach committed the initial port of NetBSD to Xen to the NetBSD source repository on March 11th, 2004. Since then, enormous progress has been made, allowing the NetBSD Project to show their commitment to their development efforts by deploying NetBSD/xen within the project.

“We use virtualization with Xen every day on the foundation’s own servers,” says Thor Lancelot Simon, a developer and system administrator with The NetBSD Foundation. “It allows us to maintain multiple, isolated environments on a single 1U server. We aren’t naive enough to think that any system has perfect security; but Xen helps us isolate critical systems from each other, and at the same time helps keep our systems physically compact and easy to manage. When you combine virtualization with Xen with NetBSD’s small size, code quality, permissive license, and comprehensive set of security features, it’s pretty clear you have a winning combination, which is why we run it on our own systems.”

NetBSD 2.0 was the tenth major release of the freely available NetBSD operating system and the first to include NetBSD/xen, a port of the NetBSD kernel that runs under the Xen version 1.2 monitor. Significant work to run Xen version 2.0 has recently been completed by Manuel Bouyer and the next release of NetBSD will in all likelihood include this code. The Xen project already supplies a version of NetBSD/xen that runs under later versions of the Xen monitor.