I'm not sure if need pushes virtualization further or if it's just marketing, but the fact remains - it's coming. Major players include early marketer VMware and Xen.

After getting included into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell's equivalent distro, Xen was moving toward vanilla kernel integration. This would have had the potential to make it the de-facto standard on Linux platforms.

OSS dev model to the rescue ! - The VMware team, understandably distressed by the development suggested a well documented, stable interface between the kernel and the hypervisor. Andrew Morton, kernel hacker extraordinaire and maintainer of the -mm patch is now supporting the implementation of the general API.

"From a high-level design perspective, I think that VMware's point is a good one, and that a general kernel-to-virtual machine interface is a better thing than a Xen-only one."

Incorporation into the kernel would make Novell and Red Hat's job a lot easier, and it might also convince smaller vendors to include support, but although Xen might still get integrated, their dev team seems to be sleeping on the job. "I've seen little from the Xen team, period. I see that Xen has been snuck into Red Hat and possibly Suse kernels, but right now I'd say it's a long way from making it into mainline," said Morton. "We really haven't even started looking at the code and discussing it."