Xen?

[Eric S. Johansson]

Jean-Eric wrote:
> Hi,
> What about Xen in Ubuntu? I was unable to find it (precompiled) anywhere 
> while it's in debian (misc?) since some time.

we've been around this barn a couple of times recently.  it's a question 
of manpower and knowledge (as is most packaging problems)

> Is there a licensing problem?

as far as I know licensing is fine it's just that making a package set 
(minimum xen-core, Dom0, DomU, and some method for creating a DomU 
runtime environment) is somewhat problematic.

one thing people have been talking about is using the dom0 filesystem as 
shared image base, create an overlay using unionfs and let the 
individual domU instances accumulate their own changes (i.e. /etc, 
/var/log).  packages and security fixes would typically be loaded into 
dom0 and become visible automatically through the rest of the virtual 
machines.

anyway, that's the theory.  I haven't had the time to play with unionFS 
  but I hope to relatively soon.