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Date:      Sun, 06 Oct 2002 15:36:02 -0400
From:      Nathan Hawkins <utsl@quic.net>
To:        Antony T Curtis <antony.t.curtis@ntlworld.com>
Cc:        freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Running independent kernel instances on dual-Xeon/E7500 system
Message-ID:  <3DA090A2.1010602@quic.net>
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0210041721250.96201-100000@root.org> <3D9EB0A4.4CD09E20@mindspring.com> <3D9EF6E9.9040700@ntlworld.com>

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Antony T Curtis wrote:
> I'm interested in persueing the idea of creating some form of 
> partitioning within one machine.... Kind of like wrapping up as many 
> global variables as possible and sharing the memory between them.
> 
> Things like netgraph to be used to allow each 'partition' to have its 
> own network interface and for communication between them. Admittedly, 
> I'm no expert on operating systems but I have been trying to study the 
> FreeBSD sources to see if I can do some crude implementation, partly to 
> satisfy my own curiosity.

There are a lot of ways to do this sort of thing. Most software 
implementations seem to fall into one of the following categories:

1. Virtual machine. (Machine, not processor emulation.) VM is the 
classic implementation, but there's also VMware on PC's, and MOL on
PPC. Probably a few others around that I'm not aware of.

2. Run one OS on top of another. Microkernel systems typically do this 
to some degree, like Lites on Mach. More recently there is User-Mode 
Linux, which seems like an interesting approach.

3. Extend the OS. In FreeBSD's case, jails provide a limited kind of 
partitioning. Some of the commercial Unices have add-ons, like Solaris 
Resource Manager, that provide a different sort of partitioning.

Each approach has advantages and disadvantages, depending on what you're 
trying to accomplish.

	---Nathan


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