From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1LFT9u-0005qz-PW for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 24 Dec 2008 07:48:18 -0500 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1LFT9u-0005qn-4U for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 24 Dec 2008 07:48:18 -0500 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (port=48657 helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1LFT9u-0005qk-1M for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 24 Dec 2008 07:48:18 -0500 Received: from mail.sterilesecurity.com ([173.45.227.235]:45029) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1LFT9t-0004qE-L7 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 24 Dec 2008 07:48:17 -0500 Message-ID: <49522F8D.4000203@turnkeylinux.org> Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2008 14:48:13 +0200 From: Liraz Siri MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: [Qemu-devel] Merging improvements from VirtualBox OSE into qemu? Reply-To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org List-Id: qemu-devel.nongnu.org List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org Cc: turnkey-discuss@lists.turnkeylinux.org Hi, I'm new to the list so let me introduce myself. I am one of the developers for TurnKey Linux, a new opensource project that develops a family of lightweight installable live CDs optimized for various server-type tasks including LAMP, Ruby on Rails, Django, Joomla, Drupal, MediaWiki, and others: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/ This type of pre-integrated, ready-to-use system is typically called a software appliance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_appliance We use qemu heavily in our development/testing. We find it's better suited as a scriptable primitive than other opensource alternative such as VirtualBox. Thankfully the KVM fork has gotten rid of the performance disadvantage qemu used to suffer from. Anyhow, I've recently explored the latest release of VirtualBox (which I understand is based on qemu). Two major changes in version 2.1 caught my attention: 1) complex setup is no longer required for "bridged" networking: This is a big win for us as the former networking setup complexity indirectly made TurnKey appliances much more difficult for regular users to set up. VirtualBox came to its senses and realized the tap configuration mess was way too complex for most users and cumbersome even for advanced users. Also, I don't think it worked with wireless NICs. In the latest release, "host interface networking" just works. The user simply selects which NIC to connect the guest to (e.g., eth0) and they're done. Behinds the scenes VirtualBox is putting your NIC into promisc mode to sniff packets to guests and injecting packets directly to the NIC. Essentially it creates a virtual NIC in software. This works without root privileges somehow, probably by taking advantage of new infrastructure in the VirtualBox device driver. 2) improved support for running 64bit guests on 32bit hosts On my Intel Core 2.4 rig I booted the Debian Lenny live CD in 48 seconds. By contrast, I booted the same CD under qemu-system-x86_64 in 257 seconds, or 5 times slower... These are dramatic improvements in usability and I'm curious whether it is likely that these changes will find there way to qemu? I know that both projects are under the same opensource license and share quite a bit of code but I don't really know too much about the internals of both projects so I'm not sure how difficult this would be to accomplish technically... Cheers, Liraz