Talk:Xen/Archive 2008

Windows support

Will Virtualization Technology enable support for Windows as a HOST OS, not only guest? See under "software platforms". Aditsu 16:05, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Not for the foreseeable future; the "host" (dom0) OS has to be Xen-aware. Theoretically possible to make what you propose work, but not terribly likely to happen any time soon as far as I can tell. Mark Williamson 12:43, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Then perhaps the phrase "This may change in the near future however, when mainstream processors will support virtualization instructions" should be removed? Aditsu 09:04, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

there was a non-distribuable port of windows xp...but it can't be distributed because of the windows xp licence...lol

by the way in this kind of paravirtualisation approach the kernel must be ported to xen because there are issues such as the scheduler:a normal kernel expect to have all the resources of the machine and so it expect to have the cpu at any time...and in such vistualised environement the cpu can be acessed by another program running on the host os and so it's unavailiable for the xen kernel...

and so VT and such processor features cope with this(i've not the confirmation of this but it seams logical...)

VT doesn't eliminate problems like scheduling - there are still some slightly weird behaviours in terms of dealing with multiplexing OS kernels that don't expect to be pre-empted. The main benefit of VT, however, is that it enables you to emulate instructions which previously couldn't be efficiently emulated, and it has some miscellaneous features for accelerating virtualisation in general. The end result is that it's simpler to support unmodified guests than it was before VT extensions were available, and it should be possible to support them with higher overall performance. Mark Williamson 17:39, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Unmodified unprivileged guests will run fine under Xen/VT, it's just that the *host* needs to be Xen-aware. i.e. you could run Windows in a guest, with a Linux, or NetBSD dom0 (for instance). So the phrase about stuff changing in the near future should be fine. In fact, Xen can run unmodified guests on Intel VT right now, with the next point release including support for AMD Pacfica also. Mark Williamson 17:39, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Are we sure this is correct (that unmodified Windows runs fine as a guest under Xen)? I ask because that is the claim here, yet on http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/OSCompatibility the listing for "Unmodified OSes" (e.g., Windows) is yellow instead of green, which I think indicates that it is broken or uncertain? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sproul (talk • contribs) 21:23, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

It seems that Micro$oft has seen the light and is now going to offer Xen-host capabilities in Longhorn Server [1]. Of course, this is (IMO) an attempt to increase the market for Windows Server, which would otherwise tip even further in favor of Unix/Linux. Note that Longhorn won't be able to run as a Xen guest, as far as I can tell, since the announcement refers to Linux as the "guest". Vindictive Warrior 22:21, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Possible danger to french and german citizens! Xen possibly named after Scientologist warlord god "Xenu".

Is there anything to do with the dangerous Scientology scam cult in IT virtualization? I noticed that both "QEMU" and "Xen" projects use parts of the name of hubbardist's supreme god (galactic warlord). His name is Xenu or Xemu according to secret "Operating Thetan" manuscripts that were leaked on the web and he is supposed to have killed some 50 billion aliens in Earth's ancient volcanos to populate our planet with suffering soul-spirits and a lot of similar cultic nonsense.

This issue is of great importance, because the scientologist cult owns many IT companies, for example they tried to attack the state security of France and Germany via Windows 2000 modules (the built-in disk defragmentation utility was OEM-produced by a wholly scientologist owned company). The German secret service and french Surete discovered the trick and forced Microsoft to drop defrag from their national language versions of Windows 2000. Please note that scientology is banned in France and Germany as a fraudulent economic crime syndicate and it is a crime to be a member.

Therefore if some virtualization solutions have anything to with the L. Ron Hubbard scam companies, such software could be banned in large parts of the EU.

This should clearly be explained in the article. Does Xen have anything to do with Scientology? If not, are you willing to change the name to avoid confusion and fear, because a lot of people know how dangerous hubbardism can be? 82.131.210.162 (talk) 10:54, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

hhahahahhahahaha ha ha ha... --Hm2k (talk) 13:26, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Um er... You do know that Xenos (disambiguation) in fact greatly precedes Scientology right (hint Greek is quite an old language)? And so does the word quick and emulator. And that QEMU is open source and originally written by Fabrice Bellard. I guess you think QEMM and Xenos is related to Scientology as well? Nil Einne (talk) 07:15, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Xen is now a "brand" rather than technology

Since XenSource was purchased by Citrix Systems, it now seems that Xen has become a brand for their overall virtualisation strategy.

   * XenApp - application virtualization
   * XenServer - server virtualization
   * XenDesktop - desktop virtualization

Currently these 3 platforms use unrelated software technology, yet have the same brand prefix.

This article should at least reference this. Also is there a category for articles where a nbrand seemingly joins disparate technologies?

Martyvis (talk) 23:46, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Performance

What about performance? How much is lost; can the loss be 0? Stephanwehner (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 02:50, 11 June 2008 (UTC)