Novell, Microsoft, and Xen

Novell put out a press release today.

It turns out that Intel has worked out some drivers for use by Windows inside a Xen paravirtualized container. This is distinct from the 'full virtualization' possible only in conjunction with things like the Intel VT instructions. I expected this to maybe be ready in time for SLES10 SP1, if we were lucky.

This is of great interest to me. I'm running windows on Xen right now, in full mode. Network performance is decidedly poor, though the rest of it works reasonably well. I'd like to run it paravirtualized if at all possible as that runs faster. Unfortunately, the drivers mentioned in the PR aren't generally available.