Re: [GIT PULL] Native Linux KVM tool for 3.1

Ingo Molnar
2011-07-25T09:26:56Z

* Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org> wrote:

> [ I thought the 'native Linux' part in 'native Linux KVM tool' was
> a dead giveaway, really. ]
>
> Now if people want to support other operating systems, that's cool
> and I'm happy to help out where I can. But I don't understand why
> people keep bringing non-Linux OSs as an argument for not merging
> tools/kvm into the Linux kernel tree. I mean really, did someone
> actually expect that a Linux kernel developer spends his weekends
> improving the state of Windows virtualization?
>
> And don't get this the wrong way either, I'm not hostile against
> other operating systems, but I simply am not interested enough in
> them to spend my time improving them.

In fact one of the problems i see with Qemu is that Qemu had to make
many compromises to support Windows and other weird platforms that
i'm (and i'd claim most other Linux kernel developers) are personally
not interested in.

So here's a 14 KLOC tools/kvm/ that does everything that i need from
virtualization (easy testing of a bzImage before rebooting the host
system into it), is clean, readable and hackable and is 1.5% of the
nearly 1 MLOC Qemu code base.

The whole tools/kvm/ code base is (much) smaller than Qemu's IA64
support code for example. The size difference is startling.

tools/kvm/ does less and in my experience does it better - is that
such a surprising thing?

So it was a no brainer for me to pull it into -tip.

Thanks,

Ingo