The Xen virtual machine monitor was recently merged into the upcoming 2.6.23 Linux kernel in a series of patches from Jeremy Fitzhardinge. The project was originally started as a research project at the University of Cambridge, and has been repeatedly discussed as a merge candidate for the mainline Linux kernel.

Xen is described in the project's FAQ as:

"Xen is a virtual machine monitor (VMM) for x86-compatible computers. Xen can securely execute multiple virtual machines, each running its own OS, on a single physical system with close-to-native performance."

Rusty Russell's lguest was recently merged into the upcoming 2.6.23 Linux kernel. The merge comment describes the project, "lguest is a simple hypervisor for Linux on Linux. Unlike kvm it doesn't need VT/SVM hardware. Unlike Xen it's simply 'modprobe and go'. Unlike both, it's 5000 lines and self-contained." The comment goes on to note:

"Performance is ok, but not great (-30% on kernel compile). But given its hackability, I expect this to improve, along with the paravirt_ops code which it supplies a complete example for. There's also a 64-bit version being worked on and other craziness.

"But most of all, lguest is awesome fun! Too much of the kernel is a big ball of hair. lguest is simple enough to dive into and hack, plus has some warts which scream 'fork me!'."