KVM has officially been released in Linux Kernel 2.6.20 as of Feb 4. The inclusion of KVM in the Linux kernel instead of Xen doesn’t seem to bother Xen project leader Ian Pratt according to http://www.devxnews.com/.

“Xen is a true hypervisor, whereas KVM is a legacy virtualization solution akin to VMware Workstation, VMserver and Microsoft Virtual PC,” Pratt told internetnews.com. “It lacks the benefits of para-virtualization performance enhancements that have been pioneered by Xen and are now being copied by VMware and Microsoft.”

Ian also stated that he isn’t looking for Xen to be included in the Linux kernel anymore stating:

“Putting Xen into Linux doesn’t make sense: hypervisors are different beasts from operating systems, so they share little code.”

Of particular interest are the comments about VMware copying Xen’s para-virtualization techniques. Although I doubt VMware will comment, I’d love to hear what they have to say about that.

You can read the Devx article here.