Calivia

OpenSolaris build 41, released last Friday, has pre-alpha support for current Xen 3.0.2 domain0 as well as domU. Guests can either be 32 or 64-bit MP. I suppose I will have to try this out pretty soon. * [http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/xen/ OpenSolaris Xen Community] * [http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel xen-devel mailinglist]

Novell has put up the SLES10 RC3 pre-release. The big changes with this new release listed by Novell are: * integration with Xen * AppArmor * integrated system management * fully integrated, high-availability storage (Linux MPIO, OCFS2) I especially like the ease-of-use of the Xen domainU installation in YaST. Even though it did not work yet when I last tried it with OpenSUSE 10.2 Alpha, but this seems to have been fixed by now. Another shortfall of the Xen installation is that only loopback filesystems could be used to install to. I usually keep my Xen hosts in LVM. Hopefully, LVM wi

Novell provides [http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfcontent/downloads.php/xenpreview/ Xen technical preview packages] on their project forge. There's packages for both [http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?xenpreview SLES10] and SUSE Linux Professional 10 and 10.1.

After attending a presentation of Levanta's Intrepid Linux management appliance by Millenux last week I read about MapFS, which is an important part of the appliance. Levanta open-sourced MapFS last fall; it is available under GPL-2. MapFS is a virtual file system that simplifies data sharing between multiple Linux machines connected to a shared storage medium (SAN/NAS/Mainframe DASD). MapFS could be used to PXE-boot diskless Xen machines off the network, among other things.

This release updates the bundled linux kernel version to 2.6.16, and makes xen a config option for i386/x86_64 builds rather than a separate top-level architecture. Support has been added for AMD's new virtualization extensions, alongside the existing support for Intel VT.

Related links

• Download source and binary tarballs along with RPMs for common distros