Baltazar Posted March 22, 2006 Share Posted March 22, 2006 For those who don’t know, and as far as I can understand, Xen is a visualisation tool such as Vmware BUT it runs by it self in the memory after the boot. And it claim to run the OS (today just Win and Linux!?) almost in native speed and it uses just 1% of your system resources. I figured this would be a great tool for the incompatibility problems and maybe minimize the patching on OS X? This article is from late Jan 06 but I find it pretty interesting! The headline is Win on Mac but it also concerns OS X on non Mac hardware in Xen: http://www.pintmaster.com/wordpress/index....ows-on-the-mac/ Xen home: http://www.xensource.com/ I found out about Xen today and I have found a couple of threads here in the forums where Xen is mentioned but non up to date and that only concerns running Osx86 in Xen. I haven't tried Xen at all or even know what the latest version is capable of, mabye someone have tried or have some info about it? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
errandwolfe Posted March 22, 2006 Share Posted March 22, 2006 I remember reading about this technology a while back, totally slipped off my radar. Please anyone with a spare system can you test this? If I remember what I read about the technology it basically loads at boot and allows you to run 2 OS's (maybe more) in totally isolated spaces on both CPU and Memory. Could basically turn a daul-boot Mac into a Mac that runs OSX and Windows AT THE SAME TIME. Please if my information is dated or incorrect, feel free to enlighten me. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-81156 Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrJägermeister Posted March 23, 2006 Share Posted March 23, 2006 I remember reading about this technology a while back, totally slipped off my radar. Please anyone with a spare system can you test this? If I remember what I read about the technology it basically loads at boot and allows you to run 2 OS's (maybe more) in totally isolated spaces on both CPU and Memory. Could basically turn a daul-boot Mac into a Mac that runs OSX and Windows AT THE SAME TIME. Please if my information is dated or incorrect, feel free to enlighten me. I run XEN with Suse10 (before with Suse 9.3). I don't have VT (PentiumM and Athlon64) so every OS needs some kernel modification, it works only with Linux or Unix, I can't run Windows (works only with VT and Xen3) or other OS without modifications. If you want to try XP & OSX you will probably need a Linux OS with XEN 3 as domO and VT enabled in order to try XP (should work) and OSX86 (working???) as domU. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-81477 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Baltazar Posted March 23, 2006 Author Share Posted March 23, 2006 Here you have a conparison between Linux native, Linux under Xen, Linux trough Vmware and Linux User mode. As you can see Xen is very close to Linux native and Vmware is far behind. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos...erformance.html Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-81770 Share on other sites More sharing options...
errandwolfe Posted March 23, 2006 Share Posted March 23, 2006 Unfortunately after doing a bit of research on this topic, it does not look like Xen (at least right now) is a viable option for running OSX and Win side by side. Apparently you need a custom kernel to run the different linux versions, and it looks like the same is true for osx86. Although Windows XP has been shown to run under Xen, it can not be done without significant modification of Windows and even after a good deal of searching I was not able to figure out exactly what those modifications are. On the plus side on a lot of blogs I was reading about Xen, it does appear they are currently working with Apple to allow OS X to be run under Xen and some blogs even mentioned a 3Q release of a collabrative project between Apple and Xen. This is just killing me though to know that such a product exists, but I can't use it yet. I would SO love to just have a barebones Win98 session running at the same time as OS X. I am a HUGE Tivo fan, but since moving to osx86, I have zero ability to pull down any of my video and even if I could, I would need Windows to re-encode it to strip out the DRM so I could watch on my Mac. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-81948 Share on other sites More sharing options...
gooki Posted March 24, 2006 Share Posted March 24, 2006 "Unfortunately after doing a bit of research on this topic, it does not look like Xen (at least right now) is a viable option for running OSX and Win side by side. Apparently you need a custom kernel to run the different linux versions, and it looks like the same is true for osx86. Although Windows XP has been shown to run under Xen, it can not be done without significant modification of Windows and even after a good deal of searching I was not able to figure out exactly what those modifications are." That's only relative to Xen 2.x, Xen 3.x allows you to run unmodified Os's provided your cpu supports hardware virtualization. The bad news is (I was all set to vitualize osx and xp), that to get a gui, you have to VNC into the OSs, which would provide a much poorer user experience. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-82362 Share on other sites More sharing options...
errandwolfe Posted March 24, 2006 Share Posted March 24, 2006 Um...VNC is already built into MacOS, I tunnel through SSH to use VNC on my Macintel. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-82454 Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrJägermeister Posted March 25, 2006 Share Posted March 25, 2006 That's only relative to Xen 2.x, Xen 3.x allows you to run unmodified Os's provided your cpu supports hardware virtualization. Only with VT, without VT (my PCs) it's not possible to run unmodified OSs with Xen3, the don0 and the domU still need a Xen kernel. It's time for me to buy new hardware The bad news about the GUI: it works only in MESA, I don't have onpenGL anymore when I start Linux in Xen. The ATI driver don't work with the Xen kernel. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-82624 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Baltazar Posted April 5, 2006 Author Share Posted April 5, 2006 Update over att Xensource. Xen Enterprise shipping in Q3 2006. And it seem to be a beta sign up going on now. http://www.xensource.com/ Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-89431 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Baltazar Posted April 11, 2006 Author Share Posted April 11, 2006 "Superior performance: XenEnterprise offers near-native performance and fine-grained resource control for guest virtual servers, and virtualizes all x86 operating systems, leveraging the hardware virtualization capabilities of Intel® VT and AMD SVM enabled processors." http://www.xensource.com/news/pr040306.html Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-93806 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr H. Potter Posted December 29, 2006 Share Posted December 29, 2006 So unless you have a machine that supports Intel VT, this won't work? The wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization_Technology seems to say that Intel VT was launched in Spring 2005, so any machine older than this won't have VT, right? How can I check? I have a P4 3ghz, socket 478. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-263892 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sproggit Posted November 1, 2007 Share Posted November 1, 2007 Mr Potter: Your P4 does not have VT, sorry Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-489921 Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Datagen Posted January 14, 2008 Share Posted January 14, 2008 Has anybody looked at this recently?, I am intrested in working on it. I have a machine with AMD V and a running xen kernel dualing with windows and centos. let me know if any one is still intrested in playing with this. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-579782 Share on other sites More sharing options...
mike-g2 Posted August 8, 2008 Share Posted August 8, 2008 Hi, I just came across this old thread and am wondering the same thing. Specifically, I've got a MacPro running Ubuntu and would like to run OS X within it. If anyone has any current info, please post. Thanks. Mike Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-849243 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luke2642 Posted August 21, 2008 Share Posted August 21, 2008 *bump* I'm curious about this too. Has anyone got OSX86 working through Xen 3.0 or higher? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-863765 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slaught3r Posted November 9, 2008 Share Posted November 9, 2008 Hey all, I'm new to InsanelyMac but this is a particularly important topic to me. Virtualization is the future of computing (as well as the past). I have recently built a XenServer Express 5.0 server and have installed Windows Server 2003 on it. There was no need to run a modifed kernel as the Intel VT support took care of that. I decided to do a web search for OSX in Xen and this led me here. Let me clear a few things up for those that are interested; VM's installed on a Xen server are NOT accessible for use on that machine. To interface with the GUI of a VM, you MUST remote in from another Machine using a variety of management consoles (I use the XenAdministrator Console as it came with Xen). The only interaction the host machine can have with the user, is allowing the user to tweak XenServer settings in a GUI on the host. This prohibits user interaction with multiple OS's on the same machine simultaneously... for instance, a laptop, running Xen that has XP and OSX running in separate VM's. I was initially hoping that would be one of the features of a XenServer (or any other hypervisor for that matter), but alas... no. To date, I haven't installed OSX within Xen, but it is coming... soon. Last year I installed OSX Tiger (Marklar Kernel) on a single core Intel Celeron PC and it worked fine minus the sound card. I am hopeful that Leopard can run natively on the XenServer I have. I will keep you apraised of my progress and please contact me with your questions about XenServer. I'll be happy to pass on whatever information I can. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-960209 Share on other sites More sharing options...
donrhummy Posted November 18, 2008 Share Posted November 18, 2008 Slaught3r, Please do keep us up to date on your progress as I'm also trying to run OS X (Leopard) in Xen on top of OpenSUSE. I do have a Xeon processor (so that supports VT-X) so Xen 3.x should allow me to run OS X without modification but I'm skeptical until I actually get it to work. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-969769 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ai Haibara Posted January 4, 2009 Share Posted January 4, 2009 Yeah, I think this is actually a pretty interesting scenario. I read somewhere that it was possible, but I've never figured out how to do it due to lack of explanation. Sherry Haibara Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12800-os-x-in-xen/#findComment-1026245 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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