I am running SUSE 9.3, and I would like to play around with XEN. I understand that it recompiles your kernal, and even the host OS interacts with it. How much of a performance hit am I looking at? Also, if I go back in to optimize me kernal later, do I have to reapply Xen? Any Xen advice someone could pass on would be appreciated. Thanks.

Has no one sued XEN? Or should I ask this on the software forum?

I've never tried it, but I'm not totally sure what it is. I've been curious, though, after trying to read about it in Linux Format. Let me know if you have any luck and how your experiments turn out

Sorry I'm no help...

I haven't used Xen yet on Fedora, although I plan to try soon. According to what I have read, Any slowdown in OS performance should be negligible when using Xen. It is supposed to be as fast as (or faster than) VMware. That is why all of the big tech players like IBM, Intel, AMD, and even Microsoft are creating virtualization-based technology with Xen at the forefront. Xen acts as an interpreter to both the Host and the guest OS, essentially resting between the OS and the hardware. As a result, the OS kernel needs to be reconfigured to work under Xen (which is why you won't see Windows running directly under Xen - you can't modify the source; although rumor has it that Microsoft already created an experimental version of XP that works under Xen). Thus it would stand to reason that if you optimize a Xen-configured kernel you would not need to reinstall Xen - however I am not 100% sure though.

If you haven't already, check out these links:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen_(vi...chine_monitor)