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Virtualization In Linux Kernel 2.6.20
mcalwell writes with an article about the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (or KVM for short) in the release candidate Linux 2.6.20 kernel. From the article: "[T]he Linux 2.6.20 kernel will include a full virtualization (not para-virtualization) solution. [KVM] is a GPL software project that has been developed and sponsored by Qumranet. In this article we are offering a brief overview of the KVM for Linux as well as offering up in-house performance numbers as we compare KVM to other virtualization solutions such as QEMU Accelerator and Xen."
Couldn't they just try to use a different acronym, how about KbVM?
No, the attention has been drawn from people actually giving a fuck.
Kernels from 2.6.9 onwards are a disaster.
The original idea was that "distributions will fork off and maintain kernel for releases". This idea has degenerated into "only distributions can fork and maintain a kernel". Sole developers and hobbyists are being treated the same way Microsoft treats them - as a "one night stand". In fact, even distributions are unable to keep up with that. Fedora has half of these bugs in it. So does etch, so does mandriva and all other lesser distributions. Only RHELL and Suse ship something reasonably useable and it is 1 year behind on features.
Reality is that anything past 2.6.9 should be called 2.7.x and that is it. And it may be seriously worth it to consider Gentoo/BSD or Debian/BSD. While the BSD crowd has its own failings, it does not change fundamental APIs for entertainment purposes every month on the stable branch.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
My experience so far...
After playing around with paravirtualization with Xen for the past two+ years, I finally got the cash in August to buy a cheapo AMD dual-core 64-bit system (~$800 at Best Buy: an HP system with a 4200 and 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM). I've run both Xen and QEMU on it under 64-bit Gentoo Linux. The performance of Windows XP on Xen vs. QEMU is fairly close. I would have to say that it seems to me that where Xen suffers is disk I/O. Anything that's disk intensive seems to eat up the CPU. I suspect this wouldn't be the case on better hardware with a high performance SCSI/RAID system. That should, at least, make things a bit better anyway. But for the time being I'm sticking with Xen since it's just too easy to use. And I am especially interested in the live migration features. As long as you have centralized disk storage, you can move live VMs between physical hosts with less than a second of interruption (ie. your users will never notice). Keep in mind, I'm doing this all at home as I'd really like to collapse many of my machines into one or two boxes and keep everything else as simple X displays where GUIs are needed. I've currently got four VMs running on the box with two of them being fully virtualized (Windows XP SP2 for access DRMed crap and Redhat Linux 7 which still hosts some services I don't want to part with) and the other two being paravirtualized (Domain0 which is just the VM management environment and my Gentoo Asterisk "PBX"). PAravirtualized performance is damn amazing. I think if I used strictly paravirtualized OSes I could probably squeeze out 20 VMs from this guy with decent performance. I actually just added two more gigs to the system tonight, and if I assume 128 megs per virtual machine (I've allocated 512M to the Windows XP VM) I can get up to 32 VMs running simultaneously.
As far as KVM goes, I've had a good deal of experience with QEMU and it KVM is similar, there are some limitations I hope they will overcome. (For what it's worth, the hardware based virtualization in Xen is also a modified QEMU process called qemu-dm) The main one being PCI device allocation. Xen allows you to partition your PCI devices and assign individual cards to specific VMs. I don't think QEMU does this, and I expect that KVM doesn't either.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
> [T]he Linux 2.6.20 kernel will include a full virtualization (not para-virtualization) solution. Yep. But Molnár Ingo (yes, the hungarian kernel hacker) Ingo Molnar announced a new patch introducing paravirtualization support for KVM.
3 ? 00:00:00 ksoftirqd/0
5 ? 00:00:00 khelper
6 ? 00:00:00 kthread
8 ? 00:00:00 kblockd/0
9 ? 00:00:00 kacpid
102 ? 00:00:00 kseriod
105 ? 00:00:00 khubd
176 ? 00:00:00 kswapd0
784 ? 00:00:00 kpsmoused
814 ? 00:00:00 khpsbpkt
818 ? 00:00:00 knodemgrd_0
seems to fit in with the naming convention of all the kernel related processes.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
Xen requires a P6 or better at this time (available for ~5 years). They hope to add support to ARM and PPC at a later time. KVM, OTOH, depends on brand-spanking new CPUs with virtualization instructions. QEmu just requires some CPU-thingy.
That information is outdated really. The main developers decided that we wouldn't have a development kernel anymore, and would instead just develop in the stable tree. Genius! Now we have all the benefits of an unstable API / ABI combined with the benefits of flaky support... Go team!
I feel your pain, deeply! A stable API / ABI is absolutely vital for ISV support and the new development model means that you can only get this if you're prepared to pay a large amount of money for your distribution. I don't want to have to pay $1500 for RHEL, but that's the only way I can run an Oracle dev server on a quad box with 16GB ram. The amusing thing is that RHEL is the ONLY piece of software I have to pay for on that machine - our site license gives us free licenses for dev and DR :)
Anyone other than SLES or RHEL is a second class Linux citizen today. Without vendor support you can forget about trying to run a stable Linux kernel anymore. Bring back the old odd / even split!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
See unistd.h for the stable API. Combined with the SVR4 ELF specification, that gives you a stable ABI. It's been a damn long time since Linux lost an old system call. Old a.out binaries from a dozen years ago still run fine. BTW, outside the kernel even glibc is doing well; the biggest problem has been the C++ library, mainly because the C++ committee kept adding features.
I think your real complaint is that out-of-tree drivers are unsupported. Tough luck. This will never change. I suggest that you get your drivers into the tree, where other people can review them for bugs (afraid of that? embarrased?) and update them as the rest of the kernel changes.