I’ve been thinking of researching the PS3 hypervisor. Mainly from a security perspective but this led me to thinking. You know what would be cool? Micro-partioning a PS3. Obviously IBM has experience with micro-partitioning on the PPC and the Linux distros are already tried and tested in these exact environments. You could use the system as a Linux server for your house (SMB, mail, et al), play games/fold proteins at the same time, and even run multiple guests if you desire.

The PS3 already has a hypervisor that allocates a subset of system resources to the “otheros” kernel. One example, the hypervisor only exposes either a 10G or a 50G virtual disk (/dev/sda) instead of the 50/10 split physical disk that actually exists (/dev/sda1, /dev/sda2). I can only assume that this is to protect proprietary/otherwise protected information on the game OS partition. A second example of the hypervisor partitioning resources: the guest OS can only access a subset of the total cell processor cores available. Another measure in controlling access to proprietary information?

Granted this hypervisor is not nearly as advanced as those found in other IBM PPC platforms. Still, I might have found a use for virtualization in my home - running games and running services at the same time. Yippee? A second use, the real dork in me wants to run other Linux OSs at the same time as a Fedora OS. Mainly because I want to experiment on other Linux distros but run Fedora to aid in my research mentioned above.