Re: [RFC] Unify KVM kernel-space and user-space code into a single project

Anthony Liguori
2010-03-21T23:50:31Z

On 03/21/2010 05:00 PM, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> If that is the theory then it has failed to trickle through in practice. As
> you know i have reported a long list of usability problems with hardly a look.
> That list could be created by pretty much anyone spending a few minutes of
> getting a first impression with qemu-kvm.
>

I think the point you're missing is that your list was from the
perspective of someone looking at a desktop virtualization solution that
had was graphically oriented.

As Avi has repeatedly mentioned, so far, that has not been the target
audience of QEMU. The target audience tends to be: 1) people looking to
do server virtualization and 2) people looking to do command line based
development.

Usually, both (1) and (2) are working on machines that are remotely
located. What's important to these users is that VMs be easily
launchable from the command line, that there is a lot of flexibility in
defining machine types, and that there is a programmatic way to interact
with a given instance of QEMU. Those are the things that we've been
focusing on recently.

The reason we don't have better desktop virtualization support is
simple. No one is volunteering to do it and no company is funding
development for it.

When you look at something like VirtualBox, what you're looking at is a
long ago forked version of QEMU with a GUI added focusing on desktop
virtualization.

There is no magic behind adding a better, more usable GUI to QEMU. It
just takes resources.

I understand that you're trying to make the point that without catering
to the desktop virtualization use case, we won't get as many developers
as we could. Personally, I don't think that argument is accurate. If
you look at VirtualBox, it's performance is terrible. Having a nice GUI
hasn't gotten them the type of developers that can improve their
performance.

No one is arguing that we wouldn't like to have a nicer UI. I'd love to
merge any patch like that.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori