In May virtualization.info reported about the impressive activity of Parallels in contributing to the Linux kernel: at that time the company ranked #9 in the list of top updated for Linux kernel 2.6.32, just behind much bigger players like Red Hat, IBM, Novell, Intel and Oracle.
Parallels even joined The Linux Foundation, in the hope to embed its OS virtualization technology (OpenVZ, and the commercial counterpart Virtuozzo Containers) in the kernel, turning the platform into a de facto standard in the hosting industry.
But there are another two virtualization vendors that are contributing a lot to the Linux kernel development: Citrix and VMware.
At the end of August interesting statistics were published by LWN.net: Citrix is ranked #12 and VMware is ranked #20 among top updaters for the new 2.6.34 kernel.
What’s interesting is that VMware is intensifying its activity for the new kernel. Maybe this is related to the planned effort to standardize the guest operating system in its virtual appliances with Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).