Will there be a port of the Haiku kernel to operate with Xen?
What is Xen?
Xen is a virtual machine monitor (VMM) for x86-compatible computers. Xen can securely execute multiple virtual machines, each running its own OS, on a single physical system with close-to-native performance.
I don’t expect that anybody from the Haiku development team will undertake such a port, but the code is open, so anybody who wants to do the work is free to make a port for Xen. Personally, I always thought Xen was next to useless because it requires the OS to be ported.
By requiring operating systems to be ported to run over Xen, machine virtualization can be achieved considerably more efficiently than schemes that rely on trapping faulting instructions or use an interpreter or JIT compiler emulating privileged operating system code. Of course, the downside is you have to do the OS port, but our experience indicates that this usually isn't too time consuming or difficult.
I’m at the same university as those guys… when Haiku gets a little more mature I could try some persuasion.