07 August 2009, 11:35

Xen project releases updates

Xen logo The team behind free hypervisor Xen have very quickly, by their standards, released updates for versions 3.3. and 3.4. Version 3.4 was a particularly unlucky release, as the features intended to simplify changing the clock frequency, and in turn allow power saving, failing to work. In certain circumstances there were also problems accessing virtual drives via the direct input/output mechanism (tap:aio). Version 3.4.1 is intended to rectify these problems. The new versions contain no fundamental changes and, as ever, the Xen development team are only releasing patches for the three year old Linux kernel 2.6.18, to allow it to be layered over the hypervisor as a helper.

As a standalone hypervisor on processors with virtualisation features, Xen can run any x86 operating system. Xen can only support paravirtualised guests when the processor has no virtualisation features. The patches for running as a paravirtualised guest have been included in the Linux kernel since 2.6.23. The new versions can be downloaded from the version control system or as a tar.gz archive. Xen is licensed under the GPL2.

(djwm)

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