ANNOUNCE: Pre-virtualization project

[Joshua LeVasseur]

The L4Ka team is pleased to announce the release of a new approach to  
building virtual machines, which we call pre-virtualization.  Pre- 
virtualization is a technique to automate para-virtualization, and is  
thus a more trustworthy alternative to L4Linux, and yet with the same  
performance that L4Linux has always achieved on the L4Ka microkernels.

Since the virtualization is automated, the final binary (whether  
Linux 2.6, Linux 2.4, FreeBSD, etc.) can execute on raw hardware, and  
on a variety of hypervisors.  At load time, the binary's  
virtualization-sensitive instructions are rewritten, and the OS is  
dynamically linked against an architectural emulation layer.

The project has been co-developed with UNSW/NICTA.

The project web page is located at:
http://l4ka.org/projects/virtualization/afterburn/

The current release supports the L4Ka::Pistachio microkernel and the  
Xen hypervisor, on x86 hardware.  We currently release support only  
for Linux 2.6 as a guest OS.  Other operating systems are under test.

This project obsoletes our prior L4Ka L4Linux work.  We thus stop  
support for our L4Linux-2.4 project, and will not publicly release  
our L4Linux 2.6 project.


Enjoy,

   The L4Ka Development Team