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

KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Posted Mar 24, 2010 18:19 UTC (Wed) by deater (subscriber, #11746)
Parent article: KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Qemu was dying? When?

I'd like to know the last time the qemu-devel list has had fewer e-mails per month than the perf devel list (oh wait, that's right, it makes much more sense to suck down the whole linux-kernel feed if all you care about is perf counters)

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KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Posted Mar 24, 2010 18:29 UTC (Wed) by avik (guest, #704) [Link] (4 responses)

qemu wasn't dying, but kvm certainly gave it a boost:

http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.qemu

KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Posted Mar 24, 2010 18:41 UTC (Wed) by deater (subscriber, #11746) [Link] (3 responses)

Qemu is a project with a split personality. There's the top-notch dynamic-binary-translation based simulator that has wide architecture support and is used by a wide variety of people to do a large number of interesting things. There were some struggles during the transition to TCG, and when the original author left, but overall steady progress has been made.

Then there's the KVM people, who cause an immense amount of code churn and discussion on the mailing list, but as far as I can ever tell don't contribute much to the original core of Qemu. It's a lot of layers upon layers of additional stuff. Fine and good, but for some reason the KVM people seem to think they are somehow saviors of the code base. Not true. And things would have been a lot better if the KVM people had worked on things in the Qemu tree to start with, instead of forking and then causing massive churn trying to merge things back to a sensible state.

KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Posted Mar 24, 2010 19:42 UTC (Wed) by avik (guest, #704) [Link]

It's true that kvm developers have no interest in the dynamic translation code. But we did contribute immensely to the device emulation code, and of course all the enterprisey stuff that's not very interesting for pure emulation.

KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Posted Mar 25, 2010 15:01 UTC (Thu) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, as far as x86/x64 virtualization is concerned, QEMU in software mode
doesn't seem very compatible and is also very slow. So I'd say it's far more
useful with KVM than without.

KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Posted Mar 26, 2010 22:01 UTC (Fri) by deater (subscriber, #11746) [Link]

Just because you have no use for a fast, cross-architecture dynamic binary translator that supports both user and full-system emulation, doesn't mean that the project is somehow dying or not useful. It's very disheartening as a Qemu developer seeing the project being dismissed as "dying" just because the latest buzzword is more in vogue. I currently have no use for KVM at all, yet I don't go around trashing it in public.