Re: [QUERY] lguest64

From: Richard W.M. Jones
Date: Thu Aug 08 2013 - 15:15:37 EST


On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 12:39:23PM +0300, Mike Rapoport wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 4:28 AM, Rusty Russell <rusty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Yes, the subset of x86-64 machines for which there isn't hardware
> > virtualization support is pretty uninteresting.
>
> There are plenty virtual machines in EC2, Rackspace, HP and other
> clouds that do not have hardware virtualization. I believe that
> running a hypervisor on them may be pretty interesting.

[Jumping in rather late]

The problem with basing this on lguest is that you would need to
implement a whole lot of stuff from qemu to make lguest really useful
as a modern hypervisor. eg. qcow2 and a variety of other block
devices, kvmclock, virtio{-scsi,-net}. Probably more, but just
implementing those will keep you going for a while. It might also be
feasible to add lguest support to qemu.

However I think it's best to do nothing and use TCG mode in qemu. TCG
is a bit slower than lguest or UML, but definitely not unusable. It's
a drop-in replacement for qemu/KVM with all the same features, and it
works today.

We use and support TCG to make libguestfs work on EC2.

Rich.

--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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