[Ovirt-devel] I'm all for it

[Perry Myers]

On 12/27/2009 01:14 PM, ovirt at proinbox.com wrote:
> Hello all-
> 
> First off I'm not a dev, just a small business owner trying to start up.
> I don't have a budget for much of anything & wind up doing most
> everything myself, which for the last year includes evaluating virtual
> infrastructure offerings.
> 
> It's quite discouraging to see just how much doesn't "just work" for
> someone like me- unfortunately oVirt included (no firmware package to
> initialize Broadcom NetXtreme II's on the standalone iso). I usually
> move on when "build" is mentioned & have no aspirations to learn git &
> thus, testing oVirt's on pause until a new iso's released.

oVirt is an open source community driven project and like most upstream
stuff it requires a fair amount of technical aptitude to get running.  We
are working to try to make it easier to use, but there is definitely a
difference between upstream projects that you can download and use for
free and productized versions of those projects where you have a company
offering formal documentation, training and support.  The phrase, 'you get
what you pay for' comes to mind. :)

To the specific issue that you mentioned: Is the driver firmware for that
particular network card open sourced and included in Fedora?  If not (i.e.
if it's a proprietary firmware) then it can't be included by default in
oVirt Node since it would probably violate licensing.

We do have a tool called edit-livecd that can be used to insert things
like additional proprietary RPMs into an existing ISO, but the insertion
of these proprietary RPMs/firmwares would need to be done by the end user
(again due to licensing).

If it's not in the Node presently because we're just not including a
package that is needed from the standard Fedora repos, please let us know
what packages you need and we can add them in.

Also, as we have said in the past: patches and requests for features are
welcome.  oVirt Node is a community driven project, so we can only provide
the features that the community helps us to define, prioritize and build.

> Not to mention how it feels to hit a feature paywall after tinkering a
> few days with something.
> 
> I'd very much like to try something like what Mr. Fortaine's speaking
> of, & I hope to see it realized one day, in a way that wouldn't require
> someone like me to hire a consultant to implement.

I'm not 100% sure I understand what Mr. Fortaine is getting at from the
emails he has sent out.  (i.e. I'm not sure if he is driving at a
particular usage model of oVirt Node or if he is advocating a BIOS HV
implementation)

There are two solutions for an 'embedded hypervisor' that I can see:

1. open source BIOS that implements HV capabilities
2. stripped down Linux using KVM that can run in minimal footprint and be
   embedded on system flash or PXE booted

oVirt Node project is focused on #2 above.  #1 is an interesting idea, but
is outside the scope of this project and also outside the scope of our
technical capabilities presently.

Thanks,
Perry