Linux heavies plan lightweight virtualisation (ZDNet)

[Posted August 23, 2006 by corbet]

ZDNet reports on containers and Linux distributions without getting into the vast amount of work which remains before an unpatched mainline kernel will support these technologies. "Novell, which wants to maintain Suse's reputation as the first place to find advanced new features for Linux, is more eager and is considering adding OpenVZ in Service Pack 1 of SLES 10. 'We are still evaluating if this is something we can take into SP1,' said Holger Dyroff, vice president of Linux product management."

Good article

Posted Aug 23, 2006 18:35 UTC (Wed) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm glad to see Novell and Red Hat finally starting to take process container virtualization seriously. Hey, even the Xen guy is quoted as calling it "fabulous" in the uses where it is appropriate.

I must admit that I was a little suprised to hear the Red Hat guy call it a RHEL 6 thing. I mean, saying that is making no commitment to it at all... since they can't really see past RHEL 5 right now. Perhaps it was just a PR parry to the SUSE guy's comment.

Luckily the OpenVZ folks having it working now... although a few iterations and a bunch more testing is a good idea.

Once the bigger distros have it as part of their stock kernels... I would hope it would lead to the eventual migration into the mainline kernel... although admittedly with a *LOT* of pain and work in the process of providing it in a manner that Linus and company would find acceptable. Putting it in vendor kernels will validate its usefulness and that's what the mainline kernel developers care about, right?

Good article

Posted Aug 23, 2006 22:37 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Well openvz cant really go into RHEL 5 at this point since the release is nearing beta. Openvz is a intrusive set of patches and putting it in a update would probably push up the risk of regression much higher and break the kernel ABI compatibility within a release.

Red Hat also has been very keen not to differ too much from upstream since that usually is a big maintenance especially if upstream adopts a different strategy which is likely with multiple virtualization contenders pushing for merge.