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

Ingo Molnar
2011-07-25T07:54:04Z

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

> On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 2:12 AM, Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@web.de> wrote:
> > That said, I definitely appreciate the bug fixes as well as code and
> > documentation improvements for KVM that originate from this effort! I'm
> > just not convinced that writing a new userland and merging it into the
> > kernel is the most efficient way to achieve that.
>
> Just to make this crystal clear for everyone: if it weren't for
> tools/kvm, I wouldn't be hacking on KVM at all. I've looked at Qemu
> in the past (and a lot recently!) and I simply don't see myself
> contributing to it, sorry. So 'most efficient' or not, I think
> tools/kvm is a net win for Linux and KVM in general.

Same here - in fact i first asked Qemu to be put into tools/qemu/ so
that it all becomes more hackable and more usable - that suggestion
was rebuked very strongly.

So i wanted to have a lightweight tool that allows me to test KVM and
tools/kvm/ does that very nicely: i type './kvm run' and i can test a
native bzImage (which has some virtualization options enabled as
well) on the _host_ distro i am running, booting to a text shell
prompt.

I can do that without downloading any (inevitably outdated)
virtualization images or maintaining my own ones. Maintaining host
userspace is more than enough for me.

So, since we already have the lguest tool in the kernel tree, why
cannot we have the much more capable tools/kvm/ in the tree?

So while it is the Qemu folks' right to oppose tools/qemu/, i don't
see why they are opposing tools/kvm/ ...

Wrt. integration with lguest - this is a new argument that was not
brought up before (i wish people would not come up with new
requirements on the day of the pull request) - i don't see how it's
relevant really: lguest was designed for legacy CPUs and tools/kvm/
is precisely about being simple and not doing legacy stuff.

If then Qemu should be the project that integrates lguest. Is anyone
on the Qemu side looking at lguest integration?

Thanks,

Ingo