User Mode Linux (UML) is open source software that allows you to run Linux in a “virtual machine” on top of a physical Linux box. This opens up some pretty powerful possibilities…
Virtual machines have long been a staple in the mainframe world. They offer the ability to partition the resources of a large machine between a large number of users in such a way that those users can’t interfere with one another. Each user gets a virtual machine running a separate operating system with a certain amount of resources assigned to it. Getting more memory, disks, or processors is a matter of changing a configuration, which is far easier than buying and physically installing the equivalent hardware.
This partitioning of a large machine into a number of virtual machines also has security advantages. If a virtual machine gets compromised, only that virtual machine’s resources are at risk. The users of other virtual machines are completely isolated from it, and their data is not in any danger.
These advantages have recently become available to the PC user. Two PC hardware emulators, VMWare and its open-source counterpart, Plex86, implement virtual machines by emulating a physical PC in software. This allows them to boot an operating system and run whatever they want under it.
This article describes a third virtual machine implementation that has a fundamentally different design than VMWare or Plex86. User-Mode Linux (UML) is a port of the Linux kernel to itself. That is, it considers the Linux system call interface to be a platform just as the Intel x86 architecture and…
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