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Windows supportWindows supportPosted Dec 7, 2005 0:03 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333)In reply to: Windows support by rvfh Parent article: Xen 3.0 released
It will only work with assistance from the hardware.
x86 is very difficult to abstract compared to other systems. IBM has built their mainframes with abstractions and such for a couple decades now and since it's designed for this from the ground up it's much more efficient. (We are running a OS that dates from the 80's on IBM hardware that dates from the late 90's using hardware and software technology that PCs are just getting. It's quite impressive.)
So these hardware 'fixes' to assist Xen in abstracting the x86 and x86-64 platform won't come into effect until the next generation of Intel and AMD proccessors are out on the market. The article mentions support for this stuff...
Of course, even though Intel and AMD worked specificly with Xen to get support for their hardware-assisted abstraction solutions other virtual machine stuff like VMWare can take advantage of it also.
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Windows support Posted Dec 7, 2005 3:28 UTC (Wed) by aliguori (subscriber, #30636) [Link] If you really want to be surprised, read the VT or Pacifica specs and then read this article describing 390 virtualization from the early 90s. There's almost a 1-1 mapping. At a talk recently, a fellow from AMD had mentioned that the reason the VT and Pacifica specs are so close to each other is that both companies had read the old IBM systems journals and based their implementations on it. What's old is new right :-)
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