Date: Sat, 9 Apr 2011 09:40:09 +0200
From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
To: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>, Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org>,
        Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        mtosatti@redhat.com, kvm@vger.kernel.org, joro@8bytes.org,
        penberg@cs.helsinki.fi, asias.hejun@gmail.com, gorcunov@gmail.com
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] Native Linux KVM tool
Message-ID: <20110409074009.GA25729@elte.hu>
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* Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> wrote:

> [...] I thought the whole point of a native kvm tool was to go all the 
> paravirt way to provide max performance and maybe also depend on vhost as 
> much as possible.

To me it's more than that: today i can use it to minimally boot test various 
native bzImages just by typing:

	kvm run ./bzImage

this will get me past most of the kernel init, up to the point where it would 
try to mount user-space. ( That's rather powerful to me personally, as i 
introduce most of my bugs to these stages of kernel bootup - and as a kernel 
developer i'm not alone there ;-)

I would be sad if i were forced to compile in some sort of paravirt support, 
just to be able to boot-test random native kernel images.

Really, if you check the code, serial console and timer support is not a big 
deal complexity-wise and it is rather useful:

  git pull git://github.com/penberg/linux-kvm master

So i think up to a point hardware emulation is both fun to implement (it's fun 
to be on the receiving end of hw calls, for a change) and a no-brainer to have 
from a usability POV. How far it wants to go we'll see! :-)

Thanks,

	Ingo
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