[Ovirt-devel] oVirtBIOS : Virtualization Firmware

[Dennis J.]

On 12/26/2009 11:17 AM, Guillaume FORTAINE wrote:

[ SNIP]
>
> This is Firmware Engineering at the highest-level, not 'marketing fluff'
> like Citrix Xen for OEMs
> or VMWare ESXi, because it would be the first true Bare-Metal Hypervisor
> in the World and
> we definitely believe that it could revolutionize the industry.

Why should I care? Don't get me wrong the idea sound interesting but I 
don't really see why it is so vitally important to put the HV right into 
the BIOS. The problem is that you loose support for a lot of hardware that 
cannot be booted with coreboot.
Earlier this year we had to come up with a virtualization solution to host 
80 VMs quickly and our first shot was VMWare ESX but that failed because 
ESX refused to work with the commodity hardware we were using. So we went 
with RHEL Xen instead which works beautifully on pretty much any system 
precisely because it isn't so closely wedded to any particular hardware.
I think using a regular BIOS that boots a minimal Kernel/Initrd from a 
flash chip gives you pretty much the same benefits of a tiny footprint but 
actually works with pretty much every machine out there.

Regards,
   Dennis