From owner-freebsd-arch Sun Oct 6 12:37:42 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4D9BA37B401 for ; Sun, 6 Oct 2002 12:37:41 -0700 (PDT) Received: from trantor.utsl.org (cvg-65-27-234-246.cinci.rr.com [65.27.234.246]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8F15E43E4A for ; Sun, 6 Oct 2002 12:37:40 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from utsl@quic.net) Received: from hotrod.utsl.org ([10.10.57.3] helo=quic.net) by trantor.utsl.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 17yHDU-0007NB-00; Sun, 06 Oct 2002 15:37:28 -0400 Message-ID: <3DA090A2.1010602@quic.net> Date: Sun, 06 Oct 2002 15:36:02 -0400 From: Nathan Hawkins User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020615 Debian/1.0.0-3 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Antony T Curtis Cc: freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Running independent kernel instances on dual-Xeon/E7500 system References: <3D9EB0A4.4CD09E20@mindspring.com> <3D9EF6E9.9040700@ntlworld.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message