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

KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Posted Mar 24, 2010 5:37 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management by drag
Parent article: KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

I mean, seriously, look at all the years of f-king work that went into things like Wine. Years and years and years of effort to create a open source win32 implementation that can run on Linux.
Well I can take KVM and in twenty minutes get something on my Linux desktop that will blow Wine away in terms of performance (except graphical) and compatibility with not only ancient Win16/win32 versions, but the most modern stuff Microsoft is coming out with.

Apples and oranges: with virtualization you need the Windows license and media. I don't have either (except for some ancient version), and don't want to buy them for my home box. Besides it would not even run KVM (slightly too old processor). These days Wine works very well for the few Windows progs I occasionally need.

Wine also allows them to run as normal windows within the Linux desktop, not inside a separate top-level window, like virtualization programs do, and access to native Linux files is painless.

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KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Posted Mar 24, 2010 22:00 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] (2 responses)

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!

KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Posted Mar 24, 2010 22:43 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (1 responses)

... 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.