On 12 Jun 2007, at 15:37, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
>> I know of people running OS X as a guest inside VMWare so it  
>> should be
>> possible, but obviously Xen's approach is sufficiently different  
>> that I
>> wouldn't expect much (if anything) in the way of driver support.
>>
> It's been a while since I looked, but IIRC there are two ways to  
> run Xen:
>
> 1. You boot the Xen kernel, which is a modified Linux kernel. It does
> all the I/O and driver stuff. Guest machines require a modified  
> kernel,
> which IIRC only exists for Linux.
>
> 2. If you have the Intel or AMD virtualization-enabled chips, you boot
> the Xen kernel and it can then boot and OS with an unmodified kernel.
> This works for at least Windows and Linux, but I don't know about  
> MacOS.
>
> In any event, the drivers in mode 2 are the guest OS drivers, so it
> "should work".

Mode 1 would definitely not work with Apple's distribution, but given  
that Darwin's kernel is open source (and already much abused in  
various other ways) it should be possible to build a Xen-friendly  
version. However I'm not aware of anyone currently working on this.

Ironically Mode 2 could be more problematic as OS X would expect Mac- 
like hardware, so if Xen provides virtual hardware in the same way as  
VMWare that could restrict functionality. However if it fully  
supports Intel's Vanderpool technology and the host machine had  
hardware supported by OS X natively then in theory it should just  
work out of the box. If only I could justify the time to experiment...


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason