On Tuesday 16 April 2002 09:14 pm, bob smith wrote:
> I was looking around the gentoo site and saw an
> interesting link about "User Mode Linux". I checked
> the website and it looks really cool. It allows
> you to have Linux running within Linux. I assume that
> it is something like VMWare. I immidiately thought of
> the posting about the Linux store and how to restrict
> users from doing harm to the system. It looks like
> this is a possible solution to that problem. Has
> anyone had any experience with UML? I would like to
> use it to try and get XFree86 working with the
> ati-gatos drivers (I hosed my system the last time I
> tried it).
Yes, I was working with it a bit just a few weeks ago. I wanted to setup a
virtual server that handled my web, smtp, and eventually file serving in a
"portable" way. That is, I wanted to be able to shut it down, copy over
the disk files to another computer and start it up with minimal
interruption (a few minutes maximum).
I looked at UML and VMWare. UML looks pretty slick. It's fast and seems to
take up less memory normally than VMWare. However, it wasn't horribly
reliable when I did my testing. There was constant disk thrashing and I
found myself running out of memory the longer I used it. Once, it even
locked up my system so badly that I needed a hard reboot. It was after
this that I went with VMWare which, while bloated, has never given me
problems.
Through questions on the uml support lists and watching replies to other
people, I came to the conclusion that my problems would likely have gone
away if I had just use a tmpfs based /tmp directory on my host system. I
haven't really had time to check if that's true.. but I have no reason to
doubt it.
I never tried to get X working (it's just a server, after all). I would
*strongly* suggest you read about how it's done on their website. It's
entirely possible that it doesn't use X drivers at all. Off the top of my
head, I think it's just an Xnest using whatever X your host system is
running.
UML is a blast to play around with if you're a geek, though. I strongly
recommend it to anybody who thinks building systems from scratch is a fun
time :-)
--
Kurt Granroth - "KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop"
KDE Developer/Evangelist |
granroth@kde.org
http://www.granroth.org |
kurt@granroth.org
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