A recent announcement on the NetBSD -announce mailing list discussed the successful efforts by Manuel Bouyer to get NetBSD working in the 2.0 version of the Xen virtual machine monitor [story]. The announcement explains, "Xen supports virtualization of x86 hardware for complete separation of virtual machine environments with only minimal decrease in performance. NetBSD/xen can run in both privileged and unprivileged virtual machines under Xen 1.2, and in unprivileged virtual machines under Xen 2.0." NetBSD 2.0 [story], the latest official release, included the NetBSD/xen port for the first time, running on Xen 1.2. Find comparisons of Xen to other virtualization techniques here. NetBSD Foundation developer and system administrator Thor Simon noted, "we use virtualization with Xen every day on the foundation's own servers. It allows us to maintain multiple, isolated environments on a single 1U server." The announcement goes on to explain:

"Using Xen, a single machine can seamlessly switch back and forth between NetBSD/i386 and NetBSD/xen kernels on the same physical hardware, allowing easy development and testing; NetBSD/i386 binaries, as well as binaries compatible with NetBSD's many operating system emulations, such as those for Linux and System V, run under NetBSD/xen without modification. At the same time, a NetBSD/xen system can coexist with other operating systems running in other Xen virtual machines; so Xen users can allocate resources to NetBSD, Linux, and other images running under Xen according to demand."

From: Jan Schaumann [email blocked]
To:  netbsd-announce
Subject: NetBSD and Xen
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 12:59:59 -0500

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The recent release of NetBSD 2.0 marked a milestone in the development
of the world's most portable operating system.  Every new release of
NetBSD brings support for even more hardware platforms than the
release before.  But the 2.0 release included support for a remarkable
new platform: the Xen virtual machine monitor.  The NetBSD Foundation
is proud to announce the continued work and intensive improvement of
its support for Xen.

Xen supports virtualization of x86 hardware for complete separation of
virtual machine environments with only minimal decrease in
performance.  NetBSD/xen can run in both privileged and unprivileged
virtual machines under Xen 1.2, and in unprivileged virtual machines
under Xen 2.0.

Christian Limpach committed the initial port of NetBSD to Xen to the
NetBSD source repository on March 11th, 2004.  Since then, enormous
progress has been made, allowing the NetBSD Project to show their
commitment to their development efforts by deploying NetBSD/xen within
the project.

"We use virtualization with Xen every day on the foundation's own
servers," says Thor Simon, a developer and system administrator with
The NetBSD Foundation.  "It allows us to maintain multiple, isolated
environments on a single 1U server.  We aren't naive enough to think
that any system has perfect security; but Xen helps us isolate
critical systems from each other, and at the same time helps keep our
systems physically compact and easy to manage.  When you combine
virtualization with Xen with NetBSD's small size, code quality,
permissive license, and comprehensive set of security features, it's
pretty clear you have a winning combination, which is why we run it on
our own systems."

NetBSD 2.0 was the tenth major release of the freely available NetBSD
operating system and the first to include NetBSD/xen, a port of the
NetBSD kernel that runs under the Xen version 1.2 monitor.
Significant work to run Xen version 2.0 has recently been completed by
Manuel Bouyer and the next release of NetBSD will in all likelihood
include this code.  The Xen project already supplies a version of
NetBSD/xen that runs under later versions of the Xen monitor.

Using Xen, a single machine can seamlessly switch back and forth
between NetBSD/i386 and NetBSD/xen kernels on the same physical
hardware, allowing easy development and testing; NetBSD/i386 binaries,
as well as binaries compatible with NetBSD's many operating system
emulations, such as those for Linux and System V, run under NetBSD/xen
without modification.  At the same time, a NetBSD/xen system can
coexist with other operating systems running in other Xen virtual
machines; so Xen users can allocate resources to NetBSD, Linux, and
other images running under Xen according to demand.

Further information about the NetBSD Foundation and the NetBSD
operating system is available online at http://www.NetBSD.org;
information about the Xen project is available from at
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/.

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