[arch-dev-public] KVM & Paravirtualization

[Jan de Groot]

On Sun, 2007-06-03 at 14:10 +0300, Roman Kyrylych wrote:
> 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.

I happen to have such a CPU which runs i686. KVM is a requirement for
qemu on x86_64 to be useful, on i686 we can choose between KVM and
kqemu.

> > 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.

Just take KVM qemu and change the flags to build with --enable-kqemu, I
tried this and qemu works with both KVM and kqemu in that way.

> >
> > 3) KVM modules in our kernel26 are very outdated and should be removed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.

Either package it as standalone or update the kernel with the new
version. Both should be fine, though packaging it standalone means [4].

> > 4) split KVM into kvm-qemu & kvm-modules?