[CoLoCo] virtualization in hardy: kvm

[Neal McBurnett]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 01:24:57AM +0100, Soren Hansen wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 09:35:07AM -0600, Kevin Fries wrote:
> > KVM does not fall back, it fails.  I tried this, and it tells me it
> > will not run the post install script from the apt-get.
> 
> A standard build of KVM will -- if the CPU extensions are not available
> -- fall back to non-accelerated mode. You insinuate that you have used
> kvm on numerous occasions since the project's inception, yet the *only*
> instance in which kvm will *not* fall back to non-accelerated mode is in
> quite recent versions in Ubuntu Hardy (I think I made this change about
> a month ago). 

Ahh - finally we find the crux of the issue!

I found 2 useful references:

http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/k/kvm/kvm_62+dfsg-0ubuntu2/changelog

> kvm (1:60+dfsg-0ubuntu2) hardy; urgency=low
>
>  * Disable non-accelerated execution.
>  * Dropped build-dependency on gcc-3.4.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=440430

> The package build-depends on gcc-3.4 and/or g++-3.4, which we will
> remove for the lenny release.
>...
> qemu requires gcc 3.x to compile.

I do see a gcc 3.4 in Hardy, but it is now in universe rather than
main.

 https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/i386/gcc-3.4-base/

So I'm guessing that the goal is to move supported packages like kvm
to more recent compilers, like the gcc 4.x.x series which has been out
since early 2005.

But I think that kvm would be useful, even unaccelerated, since in
many cases recent hardware is plenty fast enough to run important
legacy applications.  And it would be nice to be able to use all the
cool new libvirt stuff.

So this raises a number of questions.

Can all the cool new libvirt stuff be used with qemu (so a user would
simply choose kvm or qemu depending on their hardware)?

Alternatively, how hard would it be to have kvm recompiled with gcc
3.4 for non-virtualized hardware, even if it was in universe?

Virtualbox is based in part on QEMU - so does this affet Virtualbox
OSE at all?

Thanks,

Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/
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