KVM in the tree
That’s right, kvm-70 just hit portage. Go hit a rsync mirror near you!
What’s kvm, you ask? Some kind of virtual keyboard/mouse thingy? No, it’s the Kernel Virtual Machine. It’s basically like vmware. It’s actually a modified qemu that uses hardware virtualization (and only hardware virtualization; if you don’t have Intel VT or AMD-V, then use qemu or something else). It’s fast, it’s featureful, but it’s not exactly user friendly, at least not without help.
In the coming weeks, the Gentoo Virtualization team will get libvirt and the associated front ends working for it. That should up the user-friendly factor a fair amount.
Thanks Cardoe (cardoe) and Tiziano (dev-zero), the kvm co-maintainers with me, who did a lot of the work getting this ready for the tree.
That’s really great news.
I can’t wait to play around with libvirt with all the frontends. KVM seems to be a good choice since I want to replace vmware in the near future.
good to know, thanks for info.
hmm, guess someone should close bug 157987 then… did you take a look at the ebuilds from Carlo Marcelo Arenas Belon? They can be found at http://www.sajinet.com.pe/gentoo/portage/app-emulation/kvm/ and are working well for me.
Switched from the sajinet overlay to the portage unstable, and it works flaaaawlessly perfectly well! Awesome job, thanks! No need for VMWare server anymore, need for more Intel_VT capable machines as my servers now though
Using the in-kernel module built-in, and thats working very fine as well.
No idea about libvirt yet, so i’m very curious. Thanks!
I’d like to know why the ebuild no longer provides the kvm-{amd,intel} modules. I’m having a very difficult time understanding what the point of this package is if the modules aren’t built.
I don’t want to run the in-kernel KVM. KVM is one of the fastest dev’d subprojects I’ve ever seen in Linux. Waiting around for *LITERALLY* 40, 50, or 60+ patches to hit upstream is crazy.
Please explain.
This is the userspace portions of kvm. That’s it.
We have no intention of providing a kernel (which is what would be required; the kvm-intel.ko and kvm-amd.ko do not change much. All the changes are in virtio and things like that). Feel free to track the kvm kernel git tree if you need bleeding edge stuff. Things like that do *not* belong in portage.
The sajinet overlay does not ‘provide a kernel’; but then again, I’m not sure what you mean when you say that providing a kernel would be required. I do track the KVM mailing list, which is exactly why I don’t want to rely on what is in the kernel.
LOTS of people use sajinet’s overlay. I can’t believe that I am the first person to complain about this drastic change in behavior. I challenge you to find another Linux kernel-type package that doesn’t actually provide a module. Please see all audio and video drivers for examples of setting expected behavior: i.e. creating a kmod that can be loaded.