On 03/22/2010 03:24 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:On 03/21/2010 10:18 PM, Antoine Martin wrote:I thought this discussion was about making it easy to deploy... and generating a custom initrd isn't easy by any means, and it requires access to the guest filesystem (and its mkinitrd tools).That includes the guest kernel. If you can deploy a new kernel in the guest, presumably you can deploy a userspace package.
That's not always true.
The host admin can control the guest kernel via "kvm -kernel" easily enough, but he may or may not have access to the disk that is used in the guest. (think encrypted disks, service agreements, etc)
There is a matching -initrd argument that you can use to launch a daemon.
I believe that -kernel use will be rare, though. It's a lot easier to keep everything in one filesystem.Well, for what it's worth, I rarely ever use anything else. My virtual disks are raw so I can loop mount them easily, and I can also switch my guest kernels from outside... without ever needing to mount those disks.