[arch-dev-public] KVM & Paravirtualization

[Alexander Baldeck]

Roman Kyrylych wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

The thing is that - assuming it is possible - if you run a i686 guest in 
kvm-qemu on a x86_64 host, the guest does not need KVM as well.

>> 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.
> 

If it will be integrated into the qemu mainline we should wait for that 
to happen, no?

> 
> 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.
> 

Exactly, we could although assume that the modules provided by the 
kernel as the stable version. I can't tell since I haven't built and 
tested kvm-17, which would match our current kernel26.

> 
> 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! :-)
> 

I haven't even seen the option as mentioned in [1] in the current 
release. Where did you get the info from? Maybe Debian patched it in?


Cheers,

-Z

[1] http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/7337