[gentoo-user] Re: Is Qemu dead?

[Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@gmail.com>]

On 2011-09-28, Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 9:14 AM, Grant Edwards
><grant.b.edwards@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I've been trying to use Qemu to do some test installs of Ubuntu
>> server. ?I've used Qemu successfully in the past, but it seems to have
>> hit a dead end. ?The "stable" version (0.11) of Qemu just plain
>> doesn't work. There are constant segfaults and kernel panics in the
>> guest environment.
>
> Version 0.11 is more than two years old. I don't use stable Gentoo;
> is a 2-year-old version of a frequently-updated package normal in
> stable, or is the Qemu in Gentoo in need of some attention?
>
>> I updated to the ~x86 version (0.14) -- while the guest OS installs
>> and runs OK, kernel acceleration (kqemu module) is no longer
>> supported, and without it Qemu is really slow.
>
> I am not a Qemu user, but I seem to remember reading that the
> preferred method for hardware virtualization/acceleration with Qemu
> nowadays is KVM.

Yes, I should have known that.  I had forgotten that kqemu and
qemu-kvm were two completely different things.

>> For now I've switched to VirtualBox, but the console implementation in
>> VirtualBox is nightmarishly slow. When I do -l looks like it's
>> scrolling by at about 9600 baud.
>>
>> Is Qemu dead? ?Or just dying?
>
> The latest version (0.15) was released last month and the Qemu-dev
> mailing list has a lot of activity (few dozen messages per day), so it
> seems alive to me.

That's good to hear.  I've used it extensively in the past for testing
eCos (an embedded RTOS) software on a "PC motherboard" target.  Glad to 
know it's still kicking.

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! Not SENSUOUS ... only
                                  at               "FROLICSOME" ... and in
                              gmail.com            need of DENTAL WORK ... in
                                                   PAIN!!!