[Qemu-devel] My QEMU Dream System & Some ideas

[jonathan.kalbfeld@gmail.com]

First the ideas:

1/ Add a byte counter to savevm and loadvm to write to the console how
big the image is, maybe adding an optional zlib to compress it on
disk.

2/ Add checkpointing at regular intervals, saving only the deltas
using something like xdelta to compare savevm outputs.

3/ Add a shell command to the monitor.  It might come in handy.

4/ Has anyone thought about building a monolithic QEMU kernel,
something that runs at boot, does native dynamic translation and
doesn't have to worry about an underlying operating system.  In a
sense, QEMU is the OS.  It would have full control of the system
hardware and would allow the user at boot time to select an emulation
in a GRUB-like environment.


And now, the dream system:

Just curious what other people have for their QEMU Dream System.

I have Solaris Express Build 41 running on a laptop.  I have a cronjob
that takes 4 snapshots an hour of a ZFS filesystem containing my QEMU
images, using compression.    I can basically roll back to an earlier
disk image which makes it great for testing out distros, and embedded
stuff.  It's kind of fun to take a solaris installation, delete parts
of the kernel, see if it boots and then roll back to a previous
snapshot. :)  Good for simulating worst case scenarios.

jonathan

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Jonathan Kalbfeld
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