KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management [LWN.net]

KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Posted Mar 24, 2010 22:00 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106)
In reply to: KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management by eru
Parent article: KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

I am thinking that, eventually, we will have VMs running in windows, too, just like Wine does now. Think "super crazy .app bundle" where you double click the image file, it launches the guest OS, boots, launches a single application, and then makes that app fullscreen and looking like a normal window.

Some trickery would be needed for device access, saving and sharing files, etc., but these are solvable problems. The end result would be desktop app isolation, extreme app portability (I can emulate any platform anywhere, in theory) and if you made the iconify button suspend the guest to disk in whatever state it's in at the moment you could carry your work--exactly as you left it--anywhere with little more than a flash drive.

Once this is happening who cares what data centers are using virtualization for!

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KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Posted Mar 24, 2010 22:43 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

... and this would nicely solve the issues brought up in the recent lwn feature "Applications and bundled libraries". Just distribute firefox or chrome or OO.o or whatever as a virtual machine, all dependencies included.

KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Posted Mar 25, 2010 5:45 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

Absurd overkill!

If you want to eliminate dependency problems, just bundle the libraries and arrange load paths appropriately. No need to bundle the whole OS as well! I believe PC-BSD and some minor Linux distro I forget already handles packages this way.

It seems to me the current virtualization fad is rather sad. It really is motivated by hardware being better at keeping stable interfaces than software, but results in lots of wasted resources and energy.