Xen and the Art of Multi-Processor Virtualization

This doesn’t have much to do with law or even anything immediately practical, but Bernard Golden’s note, Why new chips + Xen = dream machines just happened to catch my eye. Both Intel and AMD are now building multi-core processors. According to Golden, these will run cooler and increase battery-life for portable machines–great news for students, barristers and other occasional transients. In addition, these chips are designed to do some of the virtualization work that all had to be done with software before. This will make it possible for people to run more than one operating system (Windows XP, Linux, Mac OS X) on the same machine without rebooting. The open-source Xen software can facilitate this.