Pastacode computer science blog

This howto is about installing and configuring Xen under the Linux distribution Debian Lenny. It also shows some simple steps to create and manage Xen-images.
Xen belongs to the group of paravirtualization, there an hypervisor (which runs on the host system) distributes cpu-cycles and other resources to virtual guest systems. The guest system will be directly executed on the CPU, with the exception of system calls, which are forwarded to the hypervisor. This works without special hardware extensions at an amazing performance, closely to native speed. The only drawback is that the host system must be patched in order to use the hypervisor instead of real syscalls. Special kernel-patches for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and other free operating systems are already available. If you like to run Windows, which can’t be patched, you must stick with hardware-virtualization, a feature that Xen now also offers.
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