Super Kernel Sunday

By: Carsten Emde

In other words: Linux 2.6.20 released

A Fedora 7 system hosting lots of other systems

This announcement has it: Linux 2.6.20 has been released yesterday, February 4.

This release is primarily a maintenance or "stabilization" release as Linus is pointing out: "Unlike a lot of kernels lately, there aren't really any big fundamental changes to some core infrastructure area, and while we always have bugs, I really am hoping that we fixed many more than we introduced". Among other important things (for details see here), however, this release adds the kernel virtual machine (kvm) module contributed by Avi Kivity. It allows virtualization at kernel level and is based on special hardware support of the CPU (Intel's VT/vmx and AMD's Pacifica). An entire operating system becomes a simple Linux process and can be inspected and manipulated using well-known tools such as ps, nice, kill etc. Above is a screenshot of a Fedora 7 Test 1 system running Linux 2.6.20 and hosting a DOS 6.22, a FreeBSD, a Windows 2000, a Windows XP and a Fedora Core 6 guest system - peacefully side by side. For a full resolution display of the screenshot (1600x1200) click here. Except a special version of the qemu program and, of course, the guest operating systems, there is no additional software needed to make this happen. Download qemu for kvm here.

Think it's all fake? Okay, come and see it in action next week (February 13 to 15) at our booth at the Embedded World 2007 in Nuremberg, Germany.