Re: KVM usability

Zachary Amsden
2010-03-04T20:14:19Z

On 03/04/2010 10:00 AM, Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-03-02 at 11:11 +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 2010-03-01 at 09:14 -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>>
>>> The real
>>> question to ask is, why are you using qemu directly instead of using
>>> virt-manager?
>>>
>> Because I suspect Ingo, like me, is a command line user, launching a gui
>> to start kvm when there is a kvm command around just sounds daft.
>>
>> Also, I just installed and tried it, virt-manager is a total piece of
>> shit,
>>
> That statement is far from being fair. I use virt-manager quite a lot,
> since I want to keep track of what's going on on KVM virtualization for
> end users in Fedora. What's shipped with Fedora 12 is pretty decent in
> many regards, but as in any other software there's plenty of room for
> improvements.
>

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.

Zach