Xen and Virtualisation

(Imported from rocketcat-v2)

I'm keeping a close eye on Xen at the moment - hoping that now we've got Intel Core chips in Macs, the Xen kernel can be ported to Apple hardware and appropriate drivers can be written for Mac OS X.

There's a lot of talk about Boot Camp and Parallels (and the like) at the moment, and they are each pretty good solutions, but for me the holy grail is full virtualisation of the hardware, and guest operating systems running, not one at a time, or one inside the other, but side-by-side, each having nearly full access to the hardware, and each running at nearly full speed. Being to, say, alt-tab between Mac OS X and Windows XP would be a fantastic ability, and it would mean that an Apple Mac would really be the most versatile PC that you could buy. Imagine running a copy of Solaris, and Mac OS X side-by-side on a server - Solaris to do the heavy-duty server stuff and OS X to do the easy-to-manage stuff.

We are in very interesting times at the moment. For more information on Xen, check out the wiki or have a look at Xensource.