Comments on: Virtualization: A feature of the hardware, not the OS?

Virtualization companies, unwilling to see core products become a mere operating system feature, are signing deals to build them into hardware.

[meh130]

Not a new concept

I proposed this idea back in January (http://points-east.blogspot.com/2007/01/is-this-crazy-idea.html),

Timothy Prickett Morgan proposed this idea in April (http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug040507-story04.html).

Obviously, the idea was pretty obvious to both VMware and XenSource, as they were both likely working on the idea before I thought of it.

[Ian Joyner]

A really old concept

Burroughs did this with Wilner and Barton's B1700 in the early
1970s (although it was about running different languages in an
optimized environment):

http://web.mac.com/joynerian/iWeb/Ian%20Joyner/Wilner.pdf

That kind of virtualization technology found its way into later
models of the B5000 (still the best and safest architecture
around), including A Series and Unisys Clearpath.

[chuck_whealton]

Good idea, but not exactly new

This has been available on higher end systems for a while. Grant it, it's nice that they're looking at it for consumer systems now, but it almost seems like some people are acting as though this is new.

Kind of like they did when 64bit chips started becoming available on consumer/Intel systems.

Charles R. Whealton
Charles Whealton @ pleasedontspam.com

[rcardona2k]

IBM xSeries hypervisor

IBM Research's x86 secure hypervisor is well known for several
years. I only wonder why IBM failed to capitalize on this earlier or if
they preferred to contribute behind the scenes to XenSource and/or
VMware.