Tuesday, January 31, 2006

OpenSparc Hypervisor Specification

As I mentioned here below, Sun is adding hardware virtualization assistance to future Sparc processors. This is deeply weird, because the only two sparc operating systems anybody cares about (Solaris and Linux) are already open source, and hence amenable to paravirt techniques. Given Sun's apparent commitment to Xen, I continue to regard the use of hardware virtualization assistance as a head-scratcher.

Well, now Sun has their own hypervisor API spec, not obviously related to the Xen API. Does this make for yet another competing hypervisor API in the just-getting-started Xen vs. VMware's VMIM fracas? Some sort of hedge on the part of Sun, just in case the Xen romance doesn't pan out? I wonder.

Edit: John Johnson very nicely points out that I'm being an idiot in the comments. Thanks!

1 Comments:

Blogger Keith Adams said...

Thanks, John. I guess I'm showing my x86 blinders, where I'm used to dealing with a profusion of privilege levels. I can see how porting a kernel to a monolithic user-level that it must share with applications would be a headache, or at least introduce some unfortunate overheads to kernel/user boundary crossings.

11:50 AM  

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