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9 Comments
- Darkhacker, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19>"hey argued that a closed source, commercial vendor such as VMware -- no matter how open many of its interfaces are -- could end up in control of a crucial kernel component at some future point."
As long as the interfaces are open, this won't happen. This is 2007. I sure hope that by now nobody still lives in a fantasy land where most of the Linux code is written either by Linus Torvalds or by friendly neighborhood geeks in their garages over the weekend. It simply isn't the case. Most of the new code going into the Linux kernel is by companies like Red Hat or IBM and many others as well.
>"One observer, Pierre LeFranc, reckoned that the reactions were because: "XenSource didn't like the VMware patches to Linux, but mostly they disliked the fact that VMware had patches ready to be integrated in Linux before XenSource did.""
Could be. But hey, that's open source baby! Survival of the fittest. You got to produce the best code that you can before someone else does. Isn't competition wonderful? It's why Linux is able to keep up with the big dogs in the industry. As long as the patches are GPL then I say good for VMware! - schestowitz, on 10/12/2007, -4/+21The headline is misleading because only a patch that enables better VMWare support enters the kernel. The only virtualisation technology that's contained in the kernel is KVM.
VmWare has already expressed its concerns and dissatisfaction about this and in fact argued that Red Hat, just like Microsoft, embed (or intend to in the latter case, accrording to Steve Ballmer) hypervisor in the belly of the O/S. It's a bit anticompetitive they argue, and they might take legal action. - jopsen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Legal issue, yeah right...
They wont get very far with that one... besides I think they are more than welcome to fork the Linux kernel... :) - InsaneGeek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Actually it does allow them to enter the kernel it's not really a "patch" that makes things marginally better. This will allow VMware to also run paravirtualized guests (similar to xen). VMware has stated that unless there is a standard within the OS that they don't have to modify they won't do paravirtualization, elsewise it breaks some of their stated goals regarding of not having to modify the guest OS kernel (Xen's pain is that all the guests need to run the same kernel rev as they seem to change the interface all the damn time). This is a plugin into the generic paravirtualization interface that was added in 2.6.20 (a module for a module) it being a standard non-changing interface in the kernel allows them to fulfill that requirement of not modifying the OS kernel. The workstation 6 beta supports the paravirtualization already and esx 3.x has the hooks, they basically just need to be enabled.
- GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2KVM is very different to this. One is a paravirtualisation sub system. The other is a hardware based virtualisation sub system.
- Philluminati, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1
Yeah it's KVM and I heard it dosen't need a paravirtualised guest OS.
In a few months to a year I hope we'll see new versions of Fedora, Ubuntu and other operating systems with out of the box (or straight from install) support for Windows Operating Systems like this:
http://www.marcushellberg.com/media/pictures/winlin.jpg
:-) - pixael, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Heres the link to the KVM article on Linux Devices: http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS3096958605.html
I would be very surprised if a section of the kernel became "closed source". This would defeat the idea of a GPL'd kernel. There would be a big uproar.
GPL'd patches from VMware would be a victory to the open source community at large!
- scilec, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Did I mis-read something or will this also make it a lot easier to incorporate vmware tools into virtual machines?
- bongchitis, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3what?
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