[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] [announcement] qemu/qemu-kvm announcement draft

[Simon Boulay]

On 01/09/2010 09:09 PM, Tobias Powalowski wrote:
> Am Samstag 09 Januar 2010 schrieb Dan McGee:
>> On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 11:52 AM, Tobias Powalowski<t.powa at gmx.de>  wrote:
>>>   >  Yes will change the install message.
>>>
>>>> Yes there is no mention in the changelogs, really strange.
>>>> greetings
>>>> tpowa
>>>
>>> Ok like this?
>>>   echo ">>>  Since kernel 2.6.29:"
>>>   echo ">>>  Qemu package now provides standard qemu with kvm enabled."
>>>   echo ""
>>>   echo ">>>  PLEASE READ FOR KVM USAGE!"
>>>   echo ">>>   Load the correct KVM module, you will need a KVM capable
>>> CPU!" echo ">>>   Add yourself to the group 'kvm'."
>>>   echo ">>>   Use 'qemu --enable-kvm' to use KVM."
>>>   echo ""
>>>   echo "With the release of qemu and qemu-kvm 0.12.X, the kqemu kernel
>>> module" echo "is no longer supported and will be removed from the
>>> repositories. You" echo "can safely uninstall it from your system."
>>
>> Can we put some vercmp checks around messages like this? That way
>> people only have to see them once (when they upgrade the first time to
>> a 0.12.x version for the second message). The first message should
>> really be a post_install message.
>>
>> And with all that said, why are there two packages in extra if "qemu
>> package now provides standard qemu with kvm enabled"?
>>
>> -Dan
>>
> Yes sure i can add those vercmp stuff.
> qemu and qemu-kvm is different.
> qemu-kvm is only for  kvm while qemu provides much more machines to emulate.
I'm not sure about that. Both seems to share the same code for machine 
emulation; only the kvm stuff is different. In fedora 12, they build kvm 
and qemu-system-xxx from qemu-kvm 0.11. But I don't know how this will 
evolve in the future.
If qemu and qemu-kvm are used for different purposes, one may need to 
install both apps side by side but that's not possible in archlinux.
I see two ways to handle that:
1. Permit the installation of both applications at the same time (qemu 
for system emulation, qemu-kvm for visualization). qemu-kvm executables 
can be renamed to kvm-xyz. That's what Debian do.
2. Build qemu-kvm with --target="" and all came in the same package.

With 0.11, only qemu provided kqemu but as the kqemu support is gone, 
the second proposition seems to be the way to go. I use this on 
archlinux for kvm (winXP) and sh or arm emulation without problems since 
0.11.

Simon.

> greetings
> tpowa