[Scottish] Virtualisation comparisons

[Dan Shearer]

I'm from Edinburgh, but I seem to have a lot of visits to Glasgow booked
up, so... hello everyone from http://shearer.org/Computing_and_Technology

Anyway. Here's some notes from a bit of experimenting I've been doing.
If you're interested in comparing a couple of the virtualisation systems
around, Alpha Systems (sponsored by the Japanese government) has just
released a new version of Xenoppix:

  We released new Xenoppix which is consisted of KNOPPIX5.1.1, Xen3.0.4, QEMU/KVM,
  and HTTP-FUSE(stackable/network virtual disk). You can compare Xen(3.0.4 on Linux2.6.16)
  and KVM(Release 12 on Linux2.6.19) on the CD-ROM.
  The boot of CD image is accelerated by LCAT.

http://unit.aist.go.jp/itri/knoppix/xen/index-en.html
http://www.alpha.co.jp/biz/rdg/ac-knoppix/index_en.html

(LCAT is impressive, it's the first fundamental improvement on Rusty's
cloop since its release c. 1999. All livecds will benefit from it.)

One of the things to compare these two against is QEMU+kqemu. kqemu is
now GPL. Another point: since QEMU is a vital part of Xen, QEMU is
implicit in the three most-used accellerated virtualisation systems for
Linux, four if you count VirtualBox although I don't think many people
are using it yet. QEMU 0.9.0 is out ( http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ )

Regards,

-- 
Dan Shearer
dan at shearer.org