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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."
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.
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!
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