Free Software Linux

Red Hat announced today that it will acquire Qumranet, the company behind KVM. Now Qumranet does not make its money on KVM, instead it uses KVM as part of its desktop virtualization solutions. Qumranet is also behind the very efficient SPICE protocol. I think this is a great move on both sides and I’m excited to hear a former IBM colleague’s bold move into a startup has paid off. I knew it would only be a matter of time before Qumranet was acquired, but it’s great to see it finally went through. Great ideas and technology leadership deserve to be rewarded. I think you can expect to see an increase in KVM usage in RHEL going forward ;-) I saw the press release here:

Via the LF VAC mailing list I stumbled across this wiki site for people interested in understanding all the available virtualization options for Linux. I actually learned a few things reading through the content. Check it out here: http://virt.kernelnewbies.org/

I actually haven’t been using Gentoo at all recently. It’s on an older laptop that just doesn’t keep up with all the compiling. However I have a very fast AMD64 desktop at home just waiting to try out the latest Gentoo. I was also waiting for the latest kernel to come out b/c there are some KVM, webcam, and other driver updates I’m interested in taking advantage of. In other news, 2.6.26 adds KVM support for S/390 (IBM Mainframe), PPC (IBM Power) and Itanium processors. I also noticed KGDB (kernel debugger) supports x86 and SPARC right now - SPARC? Hmm… You can read more about the new kernel features here: http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_26

Some of you might know that I use virtualization for quite some time already, usually to test other OSs and the development of EasyLFS without having to leave my working-environment, and without havin read more

Avi Kivity summarized the kvm patches bound for the 2.6.25 kernel: "Changes include performance and scalability improvements, completion of the portability work (though no new architectures are supported with this submission), support for new hardware features, using general userspace memory for kvm (which enables swapping guest memory as well as sharing memory among guests), as well as the usual cleanups and incremental fixes." The Kernel-based Virtual Machine project, kvm, was started in mid-2006, and has been part of the Linux kernel since the 2.6.20 release in February of 2007. The recent changes can be browsed with gitweb. read more