Open Source
Microsoft's Linux kernel submission driven by virtualisation, cloud
A watershed event in Microsoft's understanding of open source's future, according to experts.
By John Fontana, Network World (US) | Network World US | Published 10:15, 21 July 09
"This is another sign of Microsoft's maturation with respect to open source," says Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst with Forrester Research. "There has been a real set of stepping stones toward a pragmatic and practical embrace of open source. This is like the final capstone."
The code consists of four drivers that are part of a Microsoft technology called Linux Device Driver for Virtualization. The drivers, once added to the Linux kernel, will provide the hooks for any distribution of Linux to run on Windows Server 2008 and its Hyper-V hypervisor technology.
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One of the drivers is a virtual hypervisor bus that talks to the Windows Hyper-V platform that will sit underneath Linux. The other three are positioned on top of that and address performance and storage. One is for virtual networks, one for virtual SCSI and the last is virtual block, a storage mechanism similar to SCSI.
Wolf says there are a few things the virtualisation user base is going to want to know.
He says one question is will users see similar driver compatibility that exists between Microsoft and Citrix today.
"I can install power virtualised drivers on Xen server and they include the driver libraries for Hyper-V so that if I move a Xen server virtual machine to Hyper-V I can just run it without any modification. I am hopeful that with these open source drivers I will have similar compatibility between Hyper-V, Xen and KVM. That would be ideal," he says.
KVM is the hypervisor technology that is already a part of the Linux kernel.
Wolf says one other pressing question is how fast Novell and Red Hat will backport the new Microsoft virtualisation drivers to their distributions.
Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux driver project lead and a Novell fellow, says Novell won't hesitate.
"We will have to backport the driver to our enterprise kernel, and that will happen quickly. One of our requirements to get code into our kernel is that it must be accepted upstream and it is now accepted upstream and we can backport it. I don't know a delivery date," he said.
