[techtalk] Progeny Debian

[Jeff Dike]

michelle at murrain.net said:
> Well, yeah, OK, but the *point* of a beowulf cluster is to get more
> processing power. 

:-)

> Sure, I could put a virtual one together, and I
> guess it would be useful for learning how to put a virtual beowulf
> cluster together, and I guess it would be a useful thing to do that
> before one actually goes out and buys all that equipment and upgrades
> one's home electrical system in the process.

Yup, that's the point.  And people are starting to use UML for that.  I don't 
know about Beowulf clusters specifically, but I have heard of people using it 
to set up virtual clusters so they don't have to set up the hardware, and 
others are using it to do kernel development for cluster and NUMA hardware 
that they don't have.

> BTW, VMWare will allow you to run any OS that runs on standard PC
> hardware. 

A lot more slowly, I think...

> I got the impression that user-mode linux only allows you
> to run other virtual linux OSes - can you also run BSD? (Or, gasp,
> windows for that matter?)

UML is a virtual Linux.  It's a port of the Linux kernel, so it is inherently 
and unchangably Linux.

However, in principal, the host can be anything.  There's a FreeBSD port of 
UML in the works, and someone (before giving up on it :-() got it running on 
Windows to the point that it was trying to start init.

				Jeff