Palacios 1.3 Released


The V3VEE Project at Northwestern University, the University of New
Mexico, the University of Pittsburgh, Sandia National Labs, and Oak
Ridge National Lab are pleased to announce the release of Palacios
1.3, a substantially enhanced version of this open-source virtual
machine monitor.  Palacios provides an an open substrate for
virtualization research, development, use, and teaching in computer
systems, computer architecture, and high performance computing.

Palacios is a virtual machine monitor (VMM) that is available for
public use as a community resource.  It is highly configurable and
designed to be embeddable into different host operating systems, such
as Linux and the Kitten lightweight kernel. Palacios is a
non-paravirtualized VMM that makes extensive use of the virtualization
extensions in modern Intel and AMD x86 processors.  A compact codebase
(<100,000 lines for 1.3), Palacios has been designed to be easy to
understand and readily configurable for different environments.  It is
unique in being designed to be embeddable into other OSes instead of
being implemented in the context of a specific OS.   

Compared to 1.3, significant new functionality has been added,
including support for multicore guests, support for embedding as a
Linux kernel module, the VNET/P overlay network system, simple
checkpoint/restore, host devices, graphics consoles and VGA, and
virtual core migration.  Enhancements are present throughout the
codebase.  Currently, Palacios can run on commodity PC hardware, and
Cray XT3/4 machines such as Red Storm.

Palacios is BSD-licensed and available from http://v3vee.org. Detailed
instructions on how to download, install, build, and use Palacios are
available at http://v3vee.org. The site also includes links to the
relevant discussion groups. Community enhancements to Palacios are
very much welcomed.  The V3VEE Project is supported by the United States
National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

--The V3VEE Team