[nzlug] Xen and USB

[Daniel Lawson]

> I think what people (me too) misunderstand about Xen is that it is a
> piece of software which lets you virtualise servers. Peripherals and I/O
> other than from the disks or network don't feature in any equation. E.g.
> the nvidia graphics driver is mutually exclusive with the xen kernel.
> Xen isn't the same as vmware.

Correction: Xen isn't the same as VMWare server (sometimes called GSX
Server) or player, or the old VMWare Workstation. Xen *is* more or less
"the same" as VMWare ESX Server or Infrastructure server,. Both are
hypervisor based virtualisation systems that expect to take full control
of your computer. Neither expect you to be doing  anything else much
with the OS that has control of the physical devices such as graphics cards.

There isn't really any reason you couldn't have a Xen system running
your desktop, and even have fully accelerated graphics in the dom0.
Performance won't be so great, and you'll probably find it too annoying
to keep doing it, but it's doable.

>  Use each when appropriate for the problem
> would be my suggestion. There is also qemu and virtualbox to check out.

I agree entirely here though :)

Qemu is a bit rough round the edges on it's own, but as a technology
it's great. Not sure if virtualbox uses it, but I know it's widely used
in the Xen arena.  Virtualbox is a good piece of software, and performs
pretty well.


I'm not  sure whether either of them will let you pass a USB printer up
the stack, but unless it's a windows GDI printer, it doesn't matter -
install cups on the host (eg, the OS that's running on bare metal), set
up the printer, and share it out via IPP to your VMs.