Last chance to get in your predictions before WWDC...
Given the popularity of Parallels and VMWare, I wouldn't at all be surprised if Apple helps get Xen running on OS X and bundles it with Leopard. IMHO, while definitely more complicated, Xen is cooler than VMWare and Parallels.
What is Xen?
Xen is an abstraction layer within the OS that mediates communication between multiple OSes running at the same time at a low level. It is basically like Parallels or VMWare, except software running within these domains can access your hardware directly, and you can have these multiple OSes start up at boot along with your host OS. This approach is faster than Parallels and VMWare according to the benchmarks that have been conducted, and Xen is also open source software. You essentially get native speeds running stuff in Xen, whatever difference that exists is apparently negligible.
In thinking about this, I think the benefits to the Mac could go beyond simply being able to run certain apps.
Many hosting providers provide access to Xen provided domains (operating systems) in part to be able to run various apps, but also because it is easy to restore from an image and recover from a problem within the OS. It is also a good way of creating a buffer so that the activities you do in a Xen domain do not bring down the entire OS.
Not only can you host various versions of various OSes, but Xen is also designed to work off of its own partition - could be a real, LVM partition, or image. From this space, it can also read and write to other partitions. So, you could have your software on one partition and the OS on your Xen partition, for instance, and have your Xen partition be able to read from your software partition. This can be used to share data between multiple domains.
The benefit could potentially come from these buffers, but also the potential for serious OS integration. With virtual desktops/Spaces coming, wouldn't it be cool to press a key combo and be in Linux or Windows, have access to your home directory (providing support for the file system exists, which I guess will take a while with ZFS becoming the default), and basically have all of this stuff started at boot sort of like the Classic environment used to work? I know you can do this with Parallels and VMWare, but these run as applications. Xen resources would be managed at a much lower level.
Thoughts? Can you see Xen on OS X some day?
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