Talk:Kernel-based Virtual Machine

Computing Start‑class

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computing, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of computers, computing, and information technology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks. Start This article has been rated as Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. ??? This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Linux Start‑class Mid‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Linux, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Linux on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks. Start This article has been rated as Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Computing Start‑class Mid‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computing, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of computers, computing, and information technology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks. Start This article has been rated as Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Politics behind kvm inclusion decision?

Latest comment: 18 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

I've seen some articles mention that Xen wanted to be included in the kernel for years, and instead a fairly new component, KVM, gets included.

I was wondering what the background/politics that lead to decision are? It might be an interesting addition to this article.

I'm thinking it's because Xen made a deal with Microsoft - certainly, that seems to be what the latest Linux Format magazine is implying... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 83.104.34.212 (talk) 14:53, 17 February 2007 (UTC).Reply

It's simpler --Treekids 19:04, 21 August 2007 (UTC)Reply

Needed info

Latest comment: 17 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

I would like to see a Plain English introduction that explains in layman's terms what KVM means - so far this article starts out loaded with acronyms and terms that are obscure to the moderately educated computer user. Thanks, Walt Bankes

• What OS can run under the VM?
• What's the license on the code? GPL or other?

I couldn't access the project homepage or else I would have looked it up myself. - Taxman ^Talk 18:17, 31 January 2007 (UTC)Reply

Pretty much any OS- KVM provides the guest OS with a fairly vanilla PC (via QEMU's I/O module) that pretty much any PC OS can run on:

i440FX host PCI bridge, PIIX3 PCI to ISA bridge, Cirrus CLGD 5446 PCI VGA card or dummy VGA card with Bochs VESA extensions, PS/2 mouse and keyboard, 2 PCI IDE interfaces with hard disk and CD-ROM support, (opt) Floppy disk, zero or more NE2000 PCI network adapters, Serial ports, (opt) Creative SoundBlaster 16 sound card, (opt) ENSONIQ AudioPCI ES1370 sound card, (opt) Adlib(OPL2), (opt) Yamaha YM3812 compatible chip, PCI UHCI USB controller and a virtual USB hub, one or more CPUs, with SMP up to 255 CPUs. --Treekids 14:36, 4 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

Update

Latest comment: 18 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I've updated the page considerably to reflect the progress currently made. Feedback would be useful here. Provided that there are no objections to the current content, I'd like to extend it more in the near future.--Anthony Liguori 00:51, 7 May 2007 (UTC)Reply

Usenet references

Latest comment: 16 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

This page makes extensive references to usenet posts, via the Gmane site. Why that one, instead of the more common (and possible longerlived) google groups archive or a honest-to-god standardised news:// link (which last, admittedly, will be problematic to retrieve for many people)? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.101.113.45 (talk) 22:16, 14 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Gmane is website that archives public mailing lists and provides a mail-to-NNTP gateway. Messages found on Gmane are not present on other Usenet newsservers. -- intgr [talk] 09:17, 15 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Version numbers and infoboxes

Latest comment: 15 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

• Recently an IP user made an edit, creating a separate infobox for "kvm-kmod".
• I reverted this stating: "revert, kvm-kmod and qemu-kvm are just Fedora packages, "kmod" is the repackaging of parts of the Linux kernel"
• IP changed it back with message: "user doesn't know what he's talking about, see kvm's download page"

Yes I saw the download page. It explicitly states "The kernel modules can be found in kvm-kmod-<kernel version>. A kernel version of 2.6.32.3 means that these are the same modules as those included with the 2.6.32.3 kernel from www.kernel.org". In other words, kvm-kmod packages KVM kernel modules that are otherwise part of official kernel.org kernels.

And in fact the "kvm-kmod" package is Fedora-specific, other distros like Ubuntu, openSUSE and Arch Linux package these modules as part of the kernel package (look for files kvm.ko, kvm-amd.ko, kvm-intel.ko). The linux-kvm.org website is actually maintained by Red Hat so it's no surprise that they only cover Fedora there.

The problem with the infobox in the first place is that KVM is not one specific piece of software. "KVM" itself is actually a subsystem of the Linux kernel, which provides an user-space API to processor-specific virtualization technologies (VT-x and AMD-V). And then there's QEMU, which was forked into a "QEMU-KVM" project to add KVM support. Personally I'd just remove the version numbers from the infobox entirely because the way it's represented now is simply incorrect... But I'm not sure it will stay that way -- surely always there's someone who will add them back.

So, ideas? Alternatives? -- intgr [talk] 16:29, 4 May 2010 (UTC)Reply