A question about the future of qemu package

Marko Vojinovic vvmarko at gmail.com
Sat Oct 31 14:30:49 UTC 2009


On Saturday 31 October 2009 13:39:17 Athmane Madjoudj wrote:
> After the release of qemu-0.12 which will drop kqemu support,
> How we will accelerate qemu on a no virtualization capable CPU ?

We won't.
 
> currently i use fedora 11 with my own build of qemu rpms (with kqemu
>  support)

Theoretically, you could continue to use that old custom-built version, with 
no upgrading. But I'm not sure for how long you'll be able to compile it on a 
system with modern libraries.

However, after I started a thread about this a week ago, I learned that there 
are the following alternatives (in no particular order):

* upgrade your hardware
but be VERY CAREFUL to pick the processor correctly; test it for vmx flag using 
LiveCD before buying (cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep vmx)

* use VirtualBox-OSE
but be aware that "Open Source Edition" means "crippled", ie. no USB support 
for the guest

* use VirtualBox
but be aware that it is partly closed source

* use VMWare
but be aware that it is completely closed source, and support for kernel 
modules is not at its best (ie. sometimes kernel upgrades break things). OTOH 
when it works, vmware has by far best support for guest hardware (USB, 
bluetooth, webcam, this, that...) in contrast to virtualbox.

Pick what works best for you. There is no good open source solution.

I have vmware on a F10 box, virtualbox on F11 box, and atm I'm evaluating a 
tradeoff between having good host kernel support (virtualbox) versus good guest 
hardware support (vmware). Other than that, they are pretty much equivalent in 
features and performance.

HTH, :-)
Marko




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