


Then the daemon loads the Linux kernel in the reserved RAM area and starts it. When the coLinux-daemon.exe is started, it will parse the given config file, load the linux.sys (Windows) kernel driver and tell it to reserve the specified amount of RAM for the Linux system. CoLinux is a system that consists of a Windows kernel driver, a Linux kernel and some userspace daemon programs.

A real Linux kernel will run on your system alongside Windows. CoLinux is not an emulator or virtual machine. This approach allowed for the extensive simplification of Cooperative Linux's design and its short early beta development cycle.Ĭooperative Linux is a relatively new means to provide Linux services on a Linux or Windows host. All of these approaches work by running the guest OS in a less privileged mode than of the host kernel. The special CPL0 approach in Cooperative Linux makes it significantly different than traditional virtualization solutions such as VMware, plex86, Virtual PC, and other methods such as Xen. The host can be every OS kernel that exports basic primitives that provide the Cooperative Linux portable driver to run in CPL0 mode (ring 0) and allocate memory. Seminar represents to these two kernels as the host operating system, and the guest Linux VM respectively. However, only one of the two kernels has control on the physical hardware, where the other is provided only with virtual hardware abstraction. In that mode, each kernel has its own complete CPU context and address space, and each kernel decides when to give control back to its partner. In that sense the plainest description of Cooperative Linux is turning two operating system kernels into two big co routines. The term Cooperative is used to describe two entities working in parallel, e.g. ADVANTAGES &DISADVANTAGES………………….(29)Ĭooperative Linux utilizes the rather underused concept of a Cooperative Virtual Machine (CVM), in contrast to traditional VM's that are unprivileged and being under the complete control of the host machine. Among the technical details, it also presents the CPU-complete context switch code, hardware interrupt forwarding, the interface between the host OS and Linux, and the management of the VM's pseudo physical RAM.ĩ. The paper includes the present and future implementation details, its applications, and its comparison with other Linux virtualization methods. It allows Linux to run under any operating system that supports loading drivers, such as Windows or Linux, after minimal porting efforts. This seminar describes Cooperative Linux, a port of the Linux kernel that allows it to run as an unprivileged lightweight virtual machine in kernel mode, on top of another OS kernel.
