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