Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1750790AbWCXT4P (ORCPT ); Fri, 24 Mar 2006 14:56:15 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751357AbWCXT4P (ORCPT ); Fri, 24 Mar 2006 14:56:15 -0500 Received: from ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com ([166.70.28.69]:52184 "EHLO ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750790AbWCXT4O (ORCPT ); Fri, 24 Mar 2006 14:56:14 -0500 To: Dave Hansen Cc: Nick Piggin , Kirill Korotaev , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, herbert@13thfloor.at, devel@openvz.org, serue@us.ibm.com, akpm@osdl.org, sam@vilain.net, Alexey Kuznetsov , Pavel Emelianov , Stanislav Protassov Subject: Re: [RFC] Virtualization steps References: <44242A3F.1010307@sw.ru> <44242D4D.40702@yahoo.com.au> <1143228339.19152.91.camel@localhost.localdomain> From: ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 12:53:55 -0700 In-Reply-To: <1143228339.19152.91.camel@localhost.localdomain> (Dave Hansen's message of "Fri, 24 Mar 2006 11:25:39 -0800") Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.1007 (Gnus v5.10.7) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1839 Lines: 45 Dave Hansen writes: > On Sat, 2006-03-25 at 04:33 +1100, Nick Piggin wrote: >> Oh, after you come to an agreement and start posting patches, can you >> also outline why we want this in the kernel (what it does that low >> level virtualization doesn't, etc, etc) > > Can you wait for an OLS paper? ;) > > I'll summarize it this way: low-level virtualization uses resource > inefficiently. > > With this higher-level stuff, you get to share all of the Linux caching, > and can do things like sharing libraries pretty naturally. Also it is a major enabler for things such as process migration, between kernels. > They are also much lighter-weight to create and destroy than full > virtual machines. We were planning on doing some performance > comparisons versus some hypervisors like Xen and the ppc64 one to show > scaling with the number of virtualized instances. Creating 100 of these > Linux containers is as easy as a couple of shell scripts, but we still > can't find anybody crazy enough to go create 100 Xen VMs. One of my favorite test cases is to kill about 100 of them simultaneously :) I think on a reasonably beefy dual processor machine I should be able to get about 1000 of them running all at once. > Anyway, those are the things that came to my mind first. I'm sure the > others involved have their own motivations. The practical aspect is that several groups have found the arguments compelling enough that they have already done complete implementations. At which point getting us all to agree on a common implementation is important. :) Eric - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/