Re: Tracking KVM development

[Andre Przywara <andre.przywara@amd.com>]

Thomas Løcke wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 1:23 PM, Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com> wrote:
>> Tracking git repositories and stable setups are mutually exclusive.  If you
>> are interested in something stable I recommend staying with the distribution
>> provided setup (and picking a distribution that has an emphasis on kvm).  If
>> you want to track upstream, use qemu-kvm-0.12.x stable releases and
>> kernel.org 2.6.x.y stable releases.  If you want to track git repositories,
>> use qemu-kvm.git and kvm.git for the kernel and kvm.
> 
> Thanks Avi.
> 
> I will stay with the stable qemu-kvm releases and stable kernel.org
> kernel releases from now on.
> 
> I've never heard of any KVM specific distributions. Are you aware of
> any? My primary reason for going with Slackware, is because I already
> know it. But if there are better choices for a KVM virtualization
> host, then I'm willing to switch.
Please think twice about that. Every time I wanted to go away from 
Slackware because of missing packages I ended up with accepting the 
involved hassle with self-compiling because I could stay with the 
simplicity and clean design of Slackware.
I usually compile my own kernels anyway and use the Slackware kernels 
only for testing and installation. So I usually do "make oldconfig" on a 
stable 2.6.xx.>=3 kernel, and am happy with that. QEMU(-kvm) is not a 
problem at all, the dependencies are very small and with Slackware[64] 
13.0 it compiles out of the box with almost all features. I can send you 
a reasonably configured package (or build-script) if you like.
Currently both qemu-kvm-0.12.3 and Linux 2.6.33 work together very well, 
although I usually do only testing and development with KVM and actually 
"use" it very rarely. So if you need more upper level management tools 
(like libvirt) I cannot help you on this.

Regards,
Andre.

-- 
Andre Przywara
AMD-Operating System Research Center (OSRC), Dresden, Germany
Tel: +49 351 488-3567-12