Blog of Sylvain Le Gall

After my disappointing xen experiments, i try to use vserver. The way it handles virtualization is just a lot more simple than xen. The problem with this is that you only get linux installation. All is running upon the same kernel, every guest is separated using security context. It has advantage over chrooted env (i have also try this, but it is not worth to write a blog entry for it): it can use natively several IP/hostname.

It is a lot less fun than Xen: you cannot run windows concurrently with linux at native speed. But it is a lot more stable. I did some test and it show me that it has more or less the same stability as the Linux kernel. For now, i am able run my server for 9 days. I think this is stable.

Concerning my other need:

• i reuse the same X/XDMCP scheme as with Xen
• i set up a framebuffer (no problem)
• i can share my sound card (just have to copy dev entry of the sound card to the "/dev/" of the vserver)
• network is stable -- but there is some problem.

Just to give a quick summary of my network problem :

• some firewall rules are strange to write, because you have no originating NIC device for it
• you have to limit every duplicated daemon (host/guests) to listen to only IP address of host
• eth2 and my USB printer seems to conflict, eth0 and my sound card seems to conflict

I have concerns about the last item! I think it is related to possible not enough good driver of the NIC. I need to investigate on this point (i.e. move to linux 2.6.21).