"Ian Pratt announced the official release of Xen 2.0, 'the open-source Virtual Machine Monitor.' The project's FAQ explains, 'Xen can securely execute multiple virtual machines, each running its own OS, on a single physical system with close-to-native performance.' Their performance page offers some comparisons of Xen to native Linux, as well as to two other virtualization projects, VMware and User-Mode Linux [story]. Xen will currently run both the 2.4 Linux kernel [forum] and the 2.6 Linux kernel, as well as NetBSD. Support for running FreeBSD and Plan9 is scheduled to be added within the next few weeks..."