Virtualisation on Linux

Virtualisation on Linux
(Score:5, Informative)
by cortana (588495) <[sam] [at] [robots.org.uk]> on Tuesday December 12, @07:28AM (#17206330)
(http://robots.org.uk/)

Xen [xensource.com]
VMWare [vmware.com]
linux-vserver [linux-vserver.org]
UML [sourceforge.net]
OpenVZ [openvz.org]
Plex86 [sourceforge.net]
Qemu [bellard.free.fr]
Bochs [sourceforge.net]
lhype [ozlabs.org]

and now

KVM [sourceforge.net]

http://linuxvirtualization.com/ [linuxvirtualization.com] has some good linux to recent announcements regarding virtualisation software on Linux.

Are there any more?




Re:Virtualisation on Linux
(Score:5, Informative)
by julesh (229690) on Tuesday December 12, @08:13AM (#17206564)
Many of these are substantially different from standard virtualization systems, though:

linux-vserver and OpenVZ are chroot-based virtual hosting environments, not virtualized operating systems. You can add OpenVSD to the list of such projects, although it appears to be practically dead.

Qemu and Bochs are PC emulators, not virtual machines, which is a slightly more subtle distinction, but still one that needs to be made.

UML is something different entirely -- an operating system that is designed to run as a process on another operating system with a similar syscall interface.

That leaves KVM, Xen (which uses an exokernel, so is effectively its own OS, not a Linux-hosted VM), VMware (which is proprietary) and plex86 (which will only run modified kernels so doesn't provide a true virtual machine).

So, you see, KVM is effectively the only Linux-based VM system (by the traditional definition) on that list.


You left out dosemu [dosemu.org] (the earliest hardware virtualization, using the V86 mode of all 386-compatible processors - but also supporting 32-bit DPMI applications) and DOSBox [sourceforge.net] (which is based on bochs). Also Cooperative Linux [colinux.org] for running a Linux system under other OSes, such as Windows.