Today I came across the page which compares OpenVZ to KVM to Xen. Leaving Xen aside, from that one it looks like KVM is ways better, it got all the green pluses, while OpenVZ got all the dull minuses, except for a few features where it says "limited support".

For example, from the author's POV, KVM supports cool features such as "Independent kernel" and "Independent kernel modules" , while OpenVZ lacks all that. I am not mentioning "Full control on sockets and processes" -- definitely, such things as sockets and processes are completely out of control when you use OpenVZ, to the extent that you can not distinguish between a process, a socket, and a potato! (Was that sarcasm? Yes, in fact I don't have an idea of what do they mean by that statement...)

But such a comparison is inspiring, so I invested 15 minutes of my time and made my own, titled Car vs bike. It clearly states that a car is better than a bike -- its capacity is higher and it doesn't require lots of muscle power. After all, it has powered steering wheel (not mentioning powered windows) and can come with an automatic gearbox, air conditioning and even a sunroof! A bike, from the other side, is missing a lot of features -- even windshield wipers are absent which are standard for every car since about 1925!

Actually, I didn't stop there and made yet another comparison, titled Bike vs car. Now it's perfectly clear that a bike is a better choice than a car, since it's cheaper, ecologically clean, and you can even take it with you on a train! A car is big and heavy, it requires periodical refuelling and a parking spot.

Both comparisons are on the openvz wiki, so feel free to edit and add more features!

Disclaimer:This post is not really related to OpenVZ, but who cares? I don't... :) So from now on I will be writing more here, on just about everything.

In UNIX systems, system time is accounted as a number of seconds since so-called "UNIX epoch" -- 1 January 1970 00:00:00 UTC. This number of seconds is returned by system call time(), plus there are library routines to convert it to more human-appealing formats.

You can guess the number is pretty big nowdays, incrementing every second. In fact, it's already over a million seconds, and in about 1 hour it will be equal to 1234567890. For some people this is a good enough reason to have a beer or two in a good company. Check http://www.1234567890day.com/ for 1234567890 parties around the globe. As for myself, I will just watch the number growing. Some kind of a meditation, similar to staring at an open fire, or flowing water, or people at work... I can do that for hours! Just kidding...

On Linux, you can see the current time() using date +%s command. Enjoy.

We are going to release first 2.6.26-based kernel soon -- it went to testing today and hopefully will be released next week.

We are also changing the versioning scheme -- instead of boring numbers like 001, 002, 003 etc., every 2.6.26 OpenVZ kernel will be named after one or another great Russian writer. We will do it in alphabetical order so there will be no upgrade pain.

As you can see here, first 2.6.26 is named after Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov. I personally enjoy his The Master and Margarita (it's truly a masterpiece; although I'm afraid a lot is lost in translation) and Heart of a Dog.

And yes, we are doing that just for fun.