On Fri, 2006-02-03 at 18:01 +0200, Muli Ben-Yehuda wrote: > > You can't run Windows from Xen today, unless you either have an > > engineering sample of Intel's Core with VT enabled (the shipping > > version has VT disabled, and that includes the new Apple ProBook or > > the new IMac), or you're willing to wait few months until Intel will > > release the 'enabled' version of their Core with VT enabled. > > That's wrong, people have been able to buy VT enabled processos. Even > if they are scarce, pretty soon (weeks, a few months at most) they'll > be available everywhere.
Current P4 and PM are not VT enabled, including the Apple Dual Core Duo. (Though, rumor has it that Apple will enable VT using a simple BIOS upgrade.) AMD will release the Socket F Opterons in end of Q2/06 or even Q3/06, and even then it'll take a long time for the technology to propagate downwards. People in the technology field tend to grossly underestimate the time need to for new technology to propagate downwards. It has been, what, 14 (!!!) years since the first true 64bit CPU release (DEC Alpha) and 3 years after the first x86/64bit CPU release (Opteron) and yet, I doubt that 10% of the world is 64bit based. I doubt that we'll see VT/Pacifica going into full swing before 07. (Especially on AMDs, as AMD just started to port Xen to support Pacifica) > > > >From my short experience, Xen is a quite complex to setup, compared to > > QEMU or VMWare, and Xen has a lot of catch up to do (heck, you can't > > even use a QEMU or VMWare hard disk images with Xen unless you go > > through few "translation" methods). > > Why would you want to use a disk image when you can use a host > partition natively, or a host disk, or an LVM snapshot, or anything > else Linux can access as a block device. File images are only useful > for playing and experimenting. No doubt the proprietary VMWare is > superior to the free software Xen in a number of aspecs, but arguably > so is Windows to Linux. Which would you rather invest time and effort > in? (rhetoric question, no answer necessary). VMWare gives an option to run Windows if I really need to (and sadly enough, I am forced to do development work on Windows from time to time) without rebooting my OS. QEMU is limited to non accelerated video and doesn't build right on 64bit Linux. (I'm actually spend most of the day trying to get it to compile on FC4/x86_64) Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that Xen is a very effective solution if you have guest kernel support (Linux/BSD) and will give vmware a run for their money once VT/Pacifica goes main-stream. For but my private dual Opteron, at least for now, a freeware VMWare (even GX) is the best solution. (And AFAIK, AMD will not release Pacifica-enabled S940 Opterons, so hardware VT is at least 3 years away from me... both at home and at work) Cheers, Gilboa ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
