[arch-dev-public] KVM & Paravirtualization

[Dale Blount]

On Sun, 2007-06-03 at 22:28 +1000, James Rayner wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 03, 2007 at 12:47:41PM +0200, Alexander Baldeck wrote:
> > 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 about a capable 64bit processor running a 32 bit distro? Like the
> core 2 duos, pentium D 9x0..? 

Count me in here... This is what I was planning on doing on my core 2
duo server when I get around to it.


> > 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?
> 
> could also rename the binary, otherwise, if you're using kvm, then you
> probably wont mind if you dont have stock qemu, so a conflicts should be
> fine?
> 

I'd say it'd be fine to conflict.  You probably won't use both on the
same system.


> > 3) KVM modules in our kernel26 are very outdated and should be removed
> >      in favor of the ones provided by the KVM source tarball
> 
> or would it be better to patch the kernel with the new one?
> 
> > 4) split KVM into kvm-qemu & kvm-modules?
> 
> definitely split the modules off if they must be seperated from the
> kernel.

Agreed.


Dale