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Getting under the shell of virtualization

On kernels and other nut puns

Round up Week 3 What's an operating system anyway? The questions we posed this week were quite disconnected, but they inspired similar perspectives from the comments. Not least, respondents to the first article sought to address what exactly was an operating system. Graham Bartlett summed it up perhaps, by saying:

The answer really is "everything that doesn't do application-level processing". It's a pretty vague question, and appropriately enough gets a vague answer.

Graham was more specific on what might constitute the core of the operating system that might be called its 'kernel':


What relevance does this have to virtualization? It's an important distinction when we start to think about what exactly should go into a hypervisor, and where it should sit. TooMuchCoffee answered the former point quite succinctly when he said, "When is an operating system not an operating system? When it's a big ol' bag of drivers."



However this is by no means a done deal, and in today's legacy-rich environment it may well be a step too far, as indeed might the other architectural models that can be dreamed up. That hasn't stopped the speculation in the comments however. One anonymous respondent suggested running a JVM on top of Xen, or indeed WINE (a controversial open source Windows compatibility layer) on Xen:




All the same, comments such as these are a good illustration that there should be no sacred cows when it comes to virtualization. To bring things full circle and link back to the "what's an operating system" question, I'd like to finish with some thoughts on the second article, from W. Hower. First concerning the hypervisor layer itself.

I'm very much of the opinion that the basics of running a virtual machine should absolutely be free. The notion of paying for a hypervisor is simply ludicrous. There's nothing to it.

Now, while this view may be a little simplistic (I'd like to hear what OS kernel and hypervisor developers think of this sweeping statement), what it does illustrate is the pervading view that the very heart of a computer is rapidly commoditising. If this is the case, we will likely continue to see more attention turning to the operational aspects, as continues Mr Hower:

Management is another matter, as some of the pioneers of this latest wave of virtualization seem to have recognised some years ago, if you can integrate the management of these virtual platforms and environments into a broader suite of solutions it's real value add - hence it becomes a chargeable effort, and something that I'm prepared to pay for.


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