This case does seem to be about ESXi though. My read of what they've been doing as their "enterprise" hypervisor evolves (it's hard for me to keep track anymor

This case does seem to be about ESXi though. My read of what they've been doing as their "enterprise" hypervisor evolves (it's hard for me to keep track anymore) is that they went from the old ESX bootstrapping vmkernel using Linux and a kernel module (as I was vaguely recalling in my other post), to ESXi loading vmkernel directly, and in the process of moving to this new Type-1 architecture they decided to just lump a bunch of GPL'd code from the Linux kernel in to vmkernel. I'll be interested to see more about how this thing actually works at runtime, legal issues aside. It's quite fascinating :)