Xen?

[Ian Duggan]

Does anyone have plans to get any of the current L4 kernels working with Xen? 
They claim to have pretty good perfomance, but require a modified kernel to 
work. Might be useful for speeding up development. Xen currently has a 
version of the 2.4 linux kernel working with it, and apparently they've 
worked with Microsoft to get XP running on it as well.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/index.html

This one bit from the TODO shares some goals with uKernels:

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We'd also like to experiment moving the network and block device
drivers out of Xen, and each into their own special domains that are
given access to the specific set of h/w resources they need to
operate.  This will provide some isolation against faulty device
drivers, potentially allowing them to be restarted on failure. There
may be more context switches incurred, but due to Xen's pipelined
asynchronous i/o interface we expect this overhead to be amortised.
This architecture would also allow device drivers to be easily
upgraded independent of Xen, which is necessary for our vision of Xen
as a next-gen BIOS replacement.
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-- Ian

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Ian Duggan    address@hidden    http://www.ianduggan.net                    
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