[fedora-virt] State of KVM paravirtualization

[Ray Van Dolson]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 04:00:44PM -0700, Dor Laor wrote:
> On 10/22/2009 02:07 PM, Ray Van Dolson wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 06:39:01PM -0700, Giovanni Tirloni wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >>   I'm trying to understand where KVM stands regarding
> >> paravirtualization. I've seen the patches from 2007 by Ingo Molnar
> >> (http://people.redhat.com/mingo/kvm-paravirt-patches/) but couldn't
> >> find anything newer. Are they integrated to the mainstream kernel?
> >>
> >>   The reason I'm looking at that is because I've a server at home which
> >> doesn't have hardware-assisted virtualization support and running qemu
> >> in full virtualization mode is a bit slow. I've tried Xen and it sure
> >> is fast but I would like to experiment with KVM.
> >>
> >
> > Fortunately, RH will support Xen at least through RHEL 5's EOL.  I'm
> > sure the company I work at is not alone in having a lot of older but
> > still good hardware around that is great for Xen even if it's not cared
> > about by KVM developers so much :)
> 
> btw: it's not about care. It's not practical of kvm to implement it. By 
> the time it will work, even your Dell will be old... Also hw-assist virt 
> with nested paging is a killer, it outperforms any PV by any vendor.

Understood.  It's a priority thing either way.  Makes more sense to
pursue the new hardware than the old.  And Xen works OK for the old
stuff in the meantime. :)

> 
> >
> > (I'm thinking Dell PE 2850's, etc.. perfectly good servers that these
> > is no reason to toss)
> >
> > OpenVZ might be a good option for you as well depending on your use
> > case.
> >
> > Ray