[CoLoCo] virtualization in hardy: kvm

[Soren Hansen]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 08:25:01AM -0700, Neal McBurnett wrote:
> KVM just does not work as advertised across different platforms.

What are you specific problems? I'd love to hear about them.

> Essentially KVM is QEMU with the accelerator built in.

That's a rather simplistic (read: wrong) description. kvm is a
virtualisation solution that happens to use qemu's device model (and
really not much else). 

> That accelerator never did work as a free standing module correctly,

Well.. No, it wouldn't. It's completely analogous to a CPU (just the
chip) lying on your desk, possibly with a power supply hooked up to it.

It doesn't do much unless you attach stuff to it (like at least a
motherboard, some ram, some kind of storage device, some I/O devices..)

> so they decided to force QEMU to use it or fail, then forced the
> accelerator code into a kernel module, maintained at the kernel
> project. 

Your use of the word "force" suggests that this was an unwise decision.
However, the way to interact with hardware happens to be through the
kernel. That -- or so I'm told -- is one of the main purposes of the
kernel? How would you suggest it done differently?

> The idea is that it will eventually get enough attention that it will
> start working correctly... 

Could you be a tad more specific about the problems you're seeing? To be
honest, I'm quite new to this list (just subscribed 17 minutes ago), so
in case you've elaborated on the subject on previous occasions, I'm
afraid I've missed it.

> That was three years ago, 

I don't think how well a project works immediately after its inception
speaks a whole lot of the design choices or quality of a project several
years later. 

> and everyone has all but given up on KVM...

I don't know the basis for your claims, but several vendors (of both
commercial and free software) have high thoughts of kvm and its clean
approach to virtualisation.

> KVM was such a disaster, I would be surprised if they "anointed"
> anything. 

I've not been fortunate enough to have access to hardware with the
required CPU extensions for more than about a year, so I don't know much
about what kvm was like before then. I don't think that matters much,
though. Linux in the early nineties certainly had its problems, but I
wouldn't base much of a current day assessment of Linux on those
grounds.

> Interesting, never seen this  package before... I will need to check
> it out.  VMWare server is in Gutsy's commercial packages.  In Feisty I
> think it was in Multiverse, which was actually probably the right
> place for it.  The free and commercial packages are quite separate
> from one another, so it should not have been moved to commercial...

The commercial (now renamed to partner) repository contains (typically
non-free (as in speech)) software that Canonical's partners have paid to
get in there. If said partner chooses to not extend this wish for a
given release, it simply will not be available anymore. Just because a
vendor has different products where one has "commercial" in its name and
another one doesn't, doesn't mean that the former must go into the
commercial (now partner) repository and the latter mustn't be allowed in
there. It's much the same as e.g. asterisk-sounds-main happens to be in
universe even though it's called something-main.

> VMWare server is free to use, period.  

If you accept the terms of use and obtain a license key, yes.
Exclamation point![1]

> Of course, all the really cool tools are in the paid version.

I don't find "of course" to make sense in this context. Ubuntu, for
instance, doesn't even have a paid version. We put all the really cool
tools in the archive for all to (ab)use. Of course.

> VMWare compared to KVM is like comparing a Ferrari to a 1976 Ford
> Pinto.  Both are cars (or VMMs) but only one has all the modern
> features; and only one has fine grained level of controls managing its
> operations; and only one is reliable enough to be useful.  Fedora went
> down this road a few years ago, and it failed badly.  Never let it be
> said that the Ubuntu group is willing to learn from the mistakes of
> others.  It failed miserably in Fedora, its going to fail in Ubuntu
> also.  KVM has always been, and has shown no ability to be, anything
> but a series of bad practices over hyped.

Being a non-native speaker, I'm unable to express how much I'm looking
forward to some form of substantiation to this fud. All I can say is
that it's "a lot".

[1]: I find this to be a rather sub-optimal way of doing punctuation,
but YMMV.

-- 
Soren Hansen               | 
Virtualisation specialist  | Ubuntu Server Team
Canonical Ltd.             | http://www.ubuntu.com/
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