Are there any plans to offer non-Linux guests under Xen? I am very interested in using FreeBSD as a guest OS -- I used it for many years from 3.0 until 5.3 and consider it to be a great server OS.

I am even willing to be a guinea pig...

<kidding>
Then they might have to rename the company *node (ala *nix, to describe unix-ish OS's). I don't think *node.com is a valid domain name, though.
</kidding>

Is there a Xen machine in every datacenter? I'm having 2 Linodes in Dallas now, and I thinking of moving 1 to a Xen machine. But I don't want to "leave" Dallas, it gives me the best ping from Belgium, Europe.

Yes.

_________________
/ Peter

I note that the current Xen kernel has no module support - I don't particularly need it for anything urgent, but I'm a bit curious to why; is this waiting for more security testing?

Will the ability to upload custom kernels be available at some time? From what I can see, the security implications will be the same as with modules.

Last night I released a new Xen kernel, 2.6.18.8-domU-linode5, which "Latest 2.6" now points to. It's built from the latest stable Xen tree (Xen 3.2.0), and does have module support enabled. Most likely you'll need to source to this tree to build modules -- so I'll make that available soon.

As far as custom kernels and other weird things: I do see support in the future, but I want to get to a point where the platform is stable first.

-Chris

Cool!

_________________
/ Peter

What is the incentive for participating in the beta? Is there a discount to the monthly fee?

No direct financial incentive, but my site now runs with 4 cpus available and my tests show excellent SMP usage and floating point performance. I am continuing to test, for example I'm now checking operating system pipe performance between processes running on different CPUs.

James

It's cool? It's fast? It's not like a linode costs that much to begin with ...

Are 64-bit domU's supported in this Xen beta?

Package management is my incentive to move, not SMP or >4GB addressing. My trusty linode is the last 32-bit linux box that I'm managing. Means building custom packages twice.

The current domU kernels are 32-bit. I don't know if the host supports it - here's (one cpu out of) my linode's /proc/cpuinfo if it helps:

processor       : 3
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 15
model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           L5335  @ 2.00GHz
stepping        : 11
cpu MHz         : 2000.070
cache size      : 4096 KB
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 10
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips        : 3970.75

Xeons are 8-bit CPU's, that's why the server needs 4 of them: 8 * 4 = 32, so that the server can run a 32-bit operating system. I learned that from my years at Microsoft, don't you Linux guys know anything about computers? Macs have 32 1-bit CPU's which is why thay can't run Windows, a lot of people don't know that.

James

Would you like to provide some sources to back this statement up?

I should also add that the current generation of Mac's use off the shelf Intel processors, not 32 "1 Bit" processors.

I was wrong, actually Macs use 64 1/2-bit CPUs to reach 32 bits - sorry, my mistake. Windows can't run on 1/2-bit CPUs, so *that* is why XP won't run on Macs. I stand corrected.

James