From his corporate blog Simon Crosby, Co-Founder and CTO at XenSource, announces a major goal achieved in the Xen project:
Today is an important day in the history of the Xen project. Linus has just merged the XenSource patches into upstream for release as part of the 2.6.23 kernel.
About a year ago, XenSource, the Linux kernel community and VMware set out to develop a common interface into the Linux kernel that would allow for optimal execution on a hypervisor, taking advantage of paravirtualization – the key innovation of the Xen project that will also be adopted into Solaris 10, and that can be expected in the forthcoming Windows Server, Longhorn.
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VMware’s implementation of the paravirt_ops API is already in upstream, and VMware has now offered beta level support for this in their VMware Player and desktop products, though they have yet to announce commercial support.
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This work will allow future Linux distro kernels to simply base of kernel.org, and automatically inherit Xen support, without needing to pull the Xen paravirtualization patches into their kernel as a separate effort.
Read the whole post at source.