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Re: [Xen-users] Modified Windows OS's

> > The below statement is taken from the Xen wikipedia page. Are there ways
> > to modify windows so that it can be installed or even run from a xen
> > server that doesn't have virtualization extensions?
> >
> > "unmodified versions of Microsoft
> > Windows<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows> and other
> > proprietary operating systems can also be used as guests if the CPU
> > supports Intel VT or AMD
> > V<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization> technologies"
>
> The original Xen team did it, see Xen and the Art of Virtualization:
>
> www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/papers/2003-*xen*sosp.pdf
>
> Unfortunately they were unable to release it due to licensing issues.

Mmmm.  It was done under a Microsoft academic source license, which made it 
not possible to distribute generally.

Also worth noting is that I think the port was of XP Embedded - no graphics, 
etc, not what most people want when running Windows in a VM.  Still, it 
proved the concept of porting multiple guests to Xen was viable.

Years ago, I did hear speculation that by dropping a new HAL (which somebody 
would have to write!) onto an existing Windows it might be possible to coax 
it into running on Xen without hardware support.  Realistically, though, 
whatever the technical pros and cons of the approach it is not going to 
happen as the wide availability of HVM-capable hardware has provided a better 
alternative.

In the future, we'll probably see MS-native paravirtualisations being 
supported under mainline Xen to produce further Windows performance boosts.  
MS paravirt still requires HVM-capable hardware, even on Hyper-V, so this 
requirement is not going away.

Sorry not to be able to give you better news, Cody!

Cheers,
Mark

-- 
Push Me Pull You - Distributed SCM tool (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~maw48/pmpu/)

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