Xen Kernel in Fedora Core 6

[saki]

Hi,

I had a couple of questions about the Xen Kernel in Fedora Core 6.

1) I understood Xen as being a virtualization environment, so how can the kernel be referred to as a Xen kernel?

2) Is the virtualization now inherent to the kernel? I also noticed that this is the default for the installation of Fedora Core 6.

3) Are there any drawbacks to using this Xen kernel?

4) Does this kernel support smp? I noticed that a uname -nr shows i686. If not, then which one does?

Thanks so much!

Cheers,
Saki

[Jman]

Xen requires kernel modifications for their paravirtualized approach. Fedora ships kernels with and without these modifications.

Xen is not installed by default.

Xen causes some complications and weirdness that I can't quite explain, especially when working with proprietary modules and junk not built for it.

All kernels are SMP enabled now. You can see the config option with
grep CONFIG_SMP /boot/config-`uname -r`

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki//Tools/Xen
http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenFaq