If You Want To, It’s Your Hardware
Over at It’s FOSS is news of a new way to run a variety of Linux kernels on a single machine, natively. There’s no need for a hypervisor or licensed VM software, mklinux v7.0-mk2 will do it for free. The trick is the use of Linux’s kexec mechanism which allows multiple kernels to get along together on the same hardware. You need to chose a specific flavour of Linux to be in charge and run the host, and then can add as many different kernels as you want.
Modern NICs and SSDs can hand out separate hardware queues, so it’s not just a slice of hardware assigned to each kernel, instead it’s time sharing exclusive access. Currently mklinux v7.0-mk2 only supports x86_64 hardware, and you will likely have issues trying to get this working on older hardware, but modern hardware shouldn’t even blink at this set up.
Check out more details on how to run a smorgasbord of Linux kernels in the full article.
That's a different setup from both VMs and containers. A VM still puts a hypervisor and a host kernel between the app and the hardware. A container skips the hypervisor, but every tenant on the machine shares one kernel... This release only supports x86_64 hardware, though Multikernel Technologies says the architecture-specific code is already modular enough for other ports to follow later.
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