2007/6/3, Alexander Baldeck <kth5@archlinuxppc.org>:
Hey all,
some of you may have noticed that we have a couple of feature requests on flyspray [1] [2] regarding a new KVM and paravirtualization. I've been messing with KVM on Linuxtag. So far it works well but there's a few issues with it:
1) makes no sense to port to non-x86_64 - i686 has kqemu - the kqemu on x86_64 is pretty much useless btw - I have never heard of a 32bit CPU that actually supports this - correct me if I'm wrong
What if user has Core 2 Duo or Athlon 64 for AM2, but runs Arch i686 on it? I'm sure there are enought users.
2) it comes with a modified version of Qemu that only provides qemu-system-$CARCH and thus conflicts with qemu itself - merge with qemu package? - strip qemu-system-$CARCH off of qemu package?
I think merge would be nice, if it's not hard to implement, and won't break qemu's work with non-paravirualized machines. There are plans to merge KVM functionality into mainline qemu AFAIR.
3) KVM modules in our kernel26 are very outdated and should be removed in favor of the ones provided by the KVM source tarball
Well, in 2.6.22 it will be updated in kernel, but because new KVM versions are developed faster than kernel is released - I agree it will be better to have it separated.
4) split KVM into kvm-qemu & kvm-modules?
I have not yet tried to enable options like suggested in [2] yet but will do so soon.
What do you think?
We cannot enable it for 2.6.21 kernel because external non-free drivers will be broken. But the good news are that in 2.6.22 paravirt_ops is no longer a GPL-only export! :-)
[1] http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/7331 [2] http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/7337
-- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)