> > On Mar 13, 2006, at 19:42, Arjan van de Ven wrote: > > On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 10:30 -0800, Zachary Amsden wrote: >> and gives hypervisors room to grow while maintaining >> binary compatibility with already released kernels. > > that I buy for binary only hypervisors. But in an open source world > I'll > buy this a LOT less as being relevant. > Binary compatibility to Linux is pretty important for applications. Even though Apache is open source, I don't want to recompile it for every new Linux kernel. Fortunately I don't have to, because glibc abstracts the Linux kernel interface. Consider VMI in the same role as glibc -- when the hypervisor changes, VMI maintains compatibility with your pre-existing infrastructure, while letting you have some of the benefits of the new hypervisor. The upgrade and recompile game can quickly end in a stalemate when you have packages with conflicting dependencies (one package requires the old version, and the other package requires the new version). Josh
