Re: [QUERY] lguest64

["Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones@redhat.com>]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 12:39:23PM +0300, Mike Rapoport wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 4:28 AM, Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> wrote:
> > Yes, the subset of x86-64 machines for which there isn't hardware
> > virtualization support is pretty uninteresting.
> 
> There are plenty virtual machines in EC2, Rackspace, HP and other
> clouds that do not have hardware virtualization. I believe that
> running a hypervisor on them may be pretty interesting.

[Jumping in rather late]

The problem with basing this on lguest is that you would need to
implement a whole lot of stuff from qemu to make lguest really useful
as a modern hypervisor.  eg. qcow2 and a variety of other block
devices, kvmclock, virtio{-scsi,-net}.  Probably more, but just
implementing those will keep you going for a while.  It might also be
feasible to add lguest support to qemu.

However I think it's best to do nothing and use TCG mode in qemu.  TCG
is a bit slower than lguest or UML, but definitely not unusable.  It's
a drop-in replacement for qemu/KVM with all the same features, and it
works today.

We use and support TCG to make libguestfs work on EC2.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows programs, test, and
build Windows installers. Over 100 libraries supported.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW