[arch-dev-public] KVM & Paravirtualization

[Roman Kyrylych]

2007/6/3, Alexander Baldeck <kth5 at 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 3) KVM modules in our kernel26 are very outdated and should be removed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)