Re: [ANNOUNCE] Native Linux KVM tool

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Sat Apr 09 2011 - 03:40:37 EST



* Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> [...] I thought the whole point of a native kvm tool was to go all the
> paravirt way to provide max performance and maybe also depend on vhost as
> much as possible.

To me it's more than that: today i can use it to minimally boot test various
native bzImages just by typing:

kvm run ./bzImage

this will get me past most of the kernel init, up to the point where it would
try to mount user-space. ( That's rather powerful to me personally, as i
introduce most of my bugs to these stages of kernel bootup - and as a kernel
developer i'm not alone there ;-)

I would be sad if i were forced to compile in some sort of paravirt support,
just to be able to boot-test random native kernel images.

Really, if you check the code, serial console and timer support is not a big
deal complexity-wise and it is rather useful:

git pull git://github.com/penberg/linux-kvm master

So i think up to a point hardware emulation is both fun to implement (it's fun
to be on the receiving end of hw calls, for a change) and a no-brainer to have
from a usability POV. How far it wants to go we'll see! :-)

Thanks,

Ingo
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