VMware Teams Up With Linux Foundation -- Visual Studio Magazine

VMware Teams Up With Linux Foundation

By Kurt Mackie
08/07/2008

VMware joined the Linux Foundation on Wednesday. The alliance will help VMware further its collaboration with the Linux community, especially with developers of the Linux open source operating system kernel used to integrate VMware's virtualization software.

VMware's product provides a solution that that can abstract a computer's underlying hardware, allowing software to run across various hardware configurations. The solution uses technology called a hypervisor to do so. It helps make computers more "agnostic" to the operating systems and software used.

Currently, VMware's solution, which is not an open source application, supports "all major Linux operating systems," according to an announcement issued by the foundation.

VMware plans to contribute its Virtual Machine Interface to the foundation as an open specification. The company also expects to work with the Linux operating system kernel community on a virtualization interface, which is described by the foundation as a "source-level paravirtualization interface (paravirt-ops)."

The paravirt-ops can improve system performance by allowing information to be exchanged between the guest operating system and the hypervisor. Or, as VMware explains on its Web site: "By allowing the guest operating system to indicate its intent to the hypervisor, each can cooperate to obtain better performance when running in a virtual machine. This type of communication is referred to as paravirtualization."

Last year, VMware released an open source version of its VMware Tools. The company also started an open source collaboration project for those tools.

Other areas where VMware plans to connect with the Linux Foundation include "high-performance computing (HPC), managed desktops, Web 2.0 technologies, and software as a service (SaaS) in virtualized environments," the foundation announced.

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit foundation, typically supported by open source companies, that promotes the many flavors of open source Linux.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

GitHub Research Claims Copilot Code Quality Gains in Addition to Productivity

GitHub says new research proves its Copilot AI tool can improve code quality, following earlier reports that said it boosts developer productivity -- and has a retort for contrarian studies.
Visual Studio Devs Demand Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI: 'Why Is VSC Always Preferred?'

The brand-new Visual Studio 2022 v17.12 lets devs specify the AI model they want to use with the baked-in GitHub Copilot, but some are clamoring for more options, such as the latest/greatest Claude 3.5 Sonnet model from Anthropic that is available in VS Code.
SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric in Preview for Faster AI Apps

Microsoft's early embrace of advanced AI in its dev tooling continues apace with the new public preview of SQL database in Microsoft Fabric, the company's analytics/data platform.
Microsoft Seeks to Sort & Simplify its Agentic AI Dev Story

The company will infuse multi-agent runtime tech developed in its AutoGen research project into its production-ready Semantic Kernel SDK, both open source.
Uno Platform Unveils 'Hot Design' Tool for Cross-Platform .NET Apps

Uno Platform provided a new take on visual designers for .NET app development, claiming a breakthrough that changes code at runtime rather than the design stage.