Re: [Xen-devel] Kernels: Xen's kernel and dom0's kernel

[Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>   Am a lil confused with this. I'm tryin to develop something that's
> supposed to run on the Xen kernel but how sure can I be? According to a
> colleague I'm actually coding on dom0's kernel. Point me to the right
> directions please? Thank u.

Xen itself is a hypervisor - it's a thin "kernel"-like entity that runs 
directly on the hardware in the system and controls access to that hardware 
at a low level.

Instead of running processes, Xen runs "domains".  A domain is a running guest 
operating system.  Dom0 is the first domain to be started, then you may start 
a number of other less privileged domains.

If you're writing tools, management apps, etc then you would target the 
userspace environment of domain 0 - this is usually much the same as a normal 
Linux environment.  It's insulated from the low level features of Xen by the 
Linux kernel it is running on - Linux itself is what is running on top of 
Xen.

If you're writing something that would run as a guest operating system, then 
you're writing a guest operating system kernel to run directly on top of Xen.

Cheers,
Mark

-- 
Push Me Pull You - Distributed SCM tool (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/pmpu/)

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