It seems as though the next stable release of the Linux kernel will reportedly have a new virtualization feature developed by VMware called VMI or "virtual machine interface". The 2.6.21 kernel update will allow paravirtualized operating systems such as Linux to modify itself for faster performance when run on top of a hypervisor.

VMware originally introduced VMI back in July of 2005. It originally hoped that VMI could generically serve as an interface for any other virtualization vendor to hook into in order to communicate with the Linux kernel. However, it received a bit of pushback from some people in the open source kernel development community as they feared a closed source, commercial vendor may end up controlling part of the kernel in the future.

So, VMware modified VMI to support other hypervisors and implemented the solution as a patch to the paravirtualization interface known as paravirt-ops. It has been reported that Ubuntu 7.04 will include a VMI enabled kernel and the forthcoming VMware Workstation 6.0 product will be capable of exploiting VMI-enabled Linux kernels.

Posted by David Marshall on March 27, 2007 07:46 PM