From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>
Subject: Re: KVM usability
Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:34:02 -0600
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Cc: Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues <lmr@redhat.com>,
	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>, Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>,
	"Zhang, Yanmin" <yanmin_zhang@linux.intel.com>,
	ming.m.lin@intel.com, sheng.yang@intel.com,
	Jes Sorensen <Jes.Sorensen@redhat.com>,
	KVM General <kvm@vger.kernel.org>,
	Gleb Natapov <gleb@redhat.com>,
	Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>,
	Fr??d??ric Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>,
	Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>,
	Cole Robinson <crobinso@redhat.com>
To: Zachary Amsden <zamsden@redhat.com>
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On 03/04/2010 02:13 PM, Zachary Amsden wrote:
>
> The biggest problem with virt-manager isn't virt-manager, it's that it 
> is trying to do a nearly intractable task.  Because a qemu virtual 
> machine is not a machine at all, just a disk image without the proper 
> metadata to track the important properties of the machine, like what 
> revision of PCI chipset, how many disk controllers the thing is using, 
> what kind of graphics card, etc.
>
> These are all basic things that are left completely undefined by 
> qemu's lack of a top-level configuration file, and it's an inexcusable 
> disgrace.
>
> So virt-manager or any other management tool has the burden of 
> creating and maintaining a bunch of metadata around this workhorse 
> tool called qemu and invoking libvirt to figure out which set of 
> 100,000 blasted command line options to pass on.
>
> That's why it falls short of expectations at times, not because 
> virt-manager is crap, but because there is no well defined, well 
> designed infrastructure for it to manage and the ad-hoc solution here 
> is total crap.

And this is why we're doing QMP and qdev.  It's long overdue 
infrastructure.  It's not just the problem that you describe though.  
virt-manager is limited by what libvirt provides and today libvirt does 
not expose nearly enough qemu features for virt-manager to even attempt 
to solve the problem on it's own.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> Zach