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

[Simon Boulay]

On 01/10/2010 09:48 AM, Tobias Powalowski wrote:
> Am Samstag 09 Januar 2010 schrieb 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.
> Why?
> qemu is for those who need more different emulation types.
> qemu-kvm is only for 86 emulation with kvm hardware support.
> Both differ in files you would need to hack bios file destination etc.
> I don't see any need to install both at the same time.
Because one may want to use x86 emulation with kvm hardware support and 
qemu-system-arm for example on the same machine.
It is possible to build all targets with qemu-kvm but that's not the 
default and I don't know if that'll be the case for future release.
For 0.11 release, qemu and qemu-kvm seems to converge, but with 0.12 
that's not so clear (at least to me). As I understand it, the 
development of platform emulation is done in qemu and kvm virtualization 
is done in qemu-kvm (even if qemu has some kvm support) but the qemu 
repository is regularly merged in qemu-kvm. I don't find any official 
statement about that, so...

greetings,
Simon.

> greetings
> tpowa