The VMware house of cards

Posted by Sander_Marechal on Aug 14, 2007 9:59 AM EDT
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Bloomberg believe VMware’s IPO today may the largest technology offering since Google. But doubts have been cast over the company’s supposedly proprietary ESX product, which may be derived from Linux. Linux acts as the bootstrap for the VMkernel. When ESX boots, Linux is ESXs kernel: vmkmod is a driver, and vmkernel a large piece of software loaded by that driver that functions in kernelspace. After that, vmkernel takes over and hosts Linux as a VM. The only way to load vmkernel is by vmkmod, a driver that requires Linux. Proprietary kernel modules for Linux do exist and according to Torvalds, that’s fine - as long as a driver clearly doesn’t need Linux to start it - as is the case with Nvidia's kernel modules. But this doesn't appear to be so in VMWare's case.

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