xen and vmware, the linux kernel – the press, the politics, and the facts
Here we can read a VMware PR stunt, dated August 7, signed by someone posed as a Infoworld editor. Meanwhile, we can read a longish thread, started August 3, in the xen-devel mailing list where, guess what, people from VMware actively intervene, where real progress is beeing made, and consensus are beeing achieved. I realize that to some ‘tabloid’ wannabe reporter the facts may not be as fascinating as the soap opera pictured in the Infoworld article, buth then, in the sake of truth, paint them as what they are – fiction. One last thing – to express perplexity for one of the most dumb lines of attack to xen, used in the article, and previously, by VMware – Microsoft has signed a deal with someone – xensource – who, until now has only published open source, and GPLed, source code, and commits to use open, and well defined APIs, which it does not control, and this is seen as a defeat to… opensource, and xen ?! Really ? We blame Microsoft when they ‘re closed, and we blame them when they embrace open standards, and opensource projects… I can see the point of VMware FUD, it’s business as usual, i can even see the point of Red Hat acrobacies trying to delay the momentum of Xen until they have RHEL 5 out (to slow adoption of SLES basically) but self proclaimed credible tech press jumping in this demagogy bandwagon is too much. By the way – there is a open, and public, roadmap for xen, where is VMware’s one ?
[Adendum - August 11] This report from Information Week sets, and gets, the facts straight.
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In RedHat’s case, I think it’s simply a case of caution and conservative enterprise thinking, since that’s the market which they specialize in. RedHat has stated for years that Linux was ready for the desktop even though every other distro had proclaimed this to be false and (IMO) Fedora was good enough for the corporate desktop since version 1.0.
From my understanding, RedHat doesn’t consider Xen to be ready until it has the following two things: management tools (like VMWare), Integration into the standard kernel (until this happens, there’s always a risk that Xen can become unstable from version to version).
The management tools seem to be coming (at least there are a few sourceforge projects that claim to be working on it), but the “Outside the kernel ” status is still a big issue, ever for less conservative distros like Ubuntu. Ubuntu originally planned to go with Xen in Edgy (the next version of Ubuntu) but backed out when it notices that patches are not available for the kernel version they want to ship. If I read the specs correctly, Xen will be a “use at your own risk” feature of Edgy.
Are the Xen wars over?…
InformationWeek is reporting that XenSource and VMware have buried the hatchet in their year-long struggle to determine which virtualization API should be incorporated into the Linux kernel. If true, this is good news. However, allow me to express a li…
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