Just a bit more follow up on this topic: Kirk Ismay wrote:
> I don't think it would be appropriate to have Xen included with the stock > OpenBSD > kernel/distribution, due to both the security issues, and license issues (Xen > is GPL). > It may be better for the project to have Xen available as a port, Yes, I agree. Best not to burden the current OS ports with Xen support, but it would be great to have ports like i386-xen and/or amd64-xen available as well. It is not at all clear to me that the existance of a Xen port of OpenBSD would detract from the security or performance of the non-Xen ports of OpenBSD. You may recall I mentioned the Amazon EC2 compute cloud Xen-based service. Yesterday, Red Hat announced support for RH Enterprise Linux on Amazon's EC2: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2007/11/red-hat-enterpr.html http://www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud/?intcmp=70160000000HCbi This is interesting, RH is providing a consistent platform for premise-based, hosted, or cloud-based deployment of applications. I maintain that it would be a good thing if OpenBSD developers had similar deployment options. As a minor note, I also found this article to be in interesting introduction to Xen: http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=printer_friendly&pid=443&page=1 Best regards, Don On 10/25/07, Don Jackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I wanted to add my 2 cents to this thread. > > Ignoring the debate/flamage on this thread regarding the security > merits/risks of virtualization, I beleive there are a number of us who > would like the option to run OpenBSD as a guest under various virtual > machine frameworks. Even if it is less secure than dedicating a > machine to the problem at hand. > > Like it or not, Xen is a very popular VM environment. (Granted, this > may change if Citrix makes changes that people can't live with) > > One of the most interesting services supporting Xen is the Amazon EC2 > service, where you can buy time on their cloud to run VMs. I'd like > to be able to build/define/buy AMIs that are based on OpenBSD, and run > them on the EC2 cloud. If my application ever needs dedicated > hardware, I'll move to that, and I'd remove the VM layer, and I'd > gain more security, and more performance. > > http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011 > > Today, one has no choice but to run Linux-based AMIs on EC2. It would > be great if people could define and build OpenBSD 'software > appliances' that could be deployed both standalone and virtualized. > The ability to participate in VM ecosystems like EC2 would benefit the > broader OpenBSD initative. > > So, if the changes to OpenBSD to support running under VM frameworks > can be made without reducing the security/stability/performance of > OpenBSD when it is NOT running under VM, and if these changes can be > made with licensing terms that are consistent with the OpenBSD license > (and acceptable to Theo), then I would really like to see this happen. > > Don
