I'm Hungry!

My homework is mostly done, and I am writing this blog post at Kicky's Restaurant. I ordered their delicious Pad Thai, while my parents ordered sushi. They, and a lot of people, really enjoy sushi, but I have no desire to try it. Raw fish and seaweed do not make me want to take a bite, despite how interesting it may look. Generally, I am more of a noodle person. I love Pad Thai, Italian pasta in almost any form, and noodle kugel - the sweet kind.

My mom's chili is my favorite food - I would choose it over anything else. She makes it with ground beef, beans, tomatoes, and spices. Her secret ingredient is a square of unsweetened chocolate. Yes, you did read it correctly - she adds chocolate to the chili and it tastes delicious. Well, you cannot actually taste the chocolate, but it does change the flavor to make it richer. Mole sauce, which is used in some Spanish main dishes, also contains chocolate as a spice. I can't wait until the next time that I come home to the delicious smell of chili coming from the crock pot in the kitchen. Just in case you had not noticed, I am REALLY hungry! I hope my food comes soo . . . it's here! Time to eat!

Bonus Tech Stuff: Virtualization

There are many high-quality virtualization systems to choose from that are compatible with Linux. If you would like to run another operating system, or another instance of the same operating system, there are many options with different drawbacks, advantages, and structures. I will mainly talk about Xen and KVM, although I will also touch upon some others.

Xen has a very unusual structure, as compared to traditional virtual machine software. Rather than running as a piece of software inside of an operating system, Xen runs the main operating system as a VM. The main advantage of Xen on a desktop is that it allows for efficiently splitting a graphics card between VMs. If you are a gamer, you can use Xen in order to get high frame-rate on games running on Linux and Windows. Overall, Xen is especially efficient in IO management.

KVM is a hypervisor built into the Linux kernel. It runs on a variety of devices, and has a more traditional structure. KVM runs the VMs inside the main operating system. One key advantage of KVM for servers is that it provides live guest migration - you can move VMs to other servers before taking a server down for maintenance. This will prevent the need for any VM downtime.

Both of these commonly used virtualization systems are fast and open-source. There are also some lesser-used alternatives such as VMWare - a closed source paid virtualization product. Another type of virtualization technology available for Linux is called containers. Containers simply allow the Linux kernel to have more than one userspace, thereby creating OS-level virtualization. Many open-source containerization systems are available, including LXC, chroot, and higher level tools like Docker. Like KVM, some of these tools also support guest migration.

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