[Slackbuilds-users] RFC: qemu and aqemu

[Robby Workman]

On Fri, 3 Feb 2012 22:55:49 +0100
Matteo Bernardini <matteo.bernardini at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2012/2/3 Robby Workman <rworkman at slackbuilds.org>:
> > Yes, similar to that is what aqemu does.  It looks for both "kvm"
> > and "qemu-kvm" binaries, hence my suggestion of linking it to
> > "qemu-kvm" in the script.  Perhaps both is better...
> 
> I was missing that libvirt looks also for qemu-kvm, in this case for
> me qemu-kvm is ok as well :)


Okay, then the proposal is to only rename the binary.  
Stu, still following this?  :)


> > Oh, I see.  Good point.  In other words, you don't want to have to
> > install the regular "qemu" package to get the keymaps and such, as
> > all you care about are x86* architectures.
> 
> Nono, I am about to use it extensively with ARM ones :)


But ARM doesn't make use of KVM extensions, and that leads to...


> It's just that I think that usually, between qemu-kvm and qemu, only
> one should be needed, depending on the hardware on which you have to
> do virtualization.
> but, who knows, maybe I'm missing some use cases...


Yes, so use plain qemu for ARM and other architectures.

My understanding is that the qemu-kvm codebase is optimized for 
*only* KVM usage, and thus some more generic optimizations (e.g.
for ARM and other non-KVM architectures) may not be present, 
while the exact opposite is true of the regular qemu codebase.
Therefore, the best approach would be to have only the "qemu-kvm"
package installed if you only need virtualization (i.e. x86*), 
or install only the regular "qemu" package if you only need to 
work with non-KVM-enabled architectures (e.g. ARM), or install 
both packages if you need to do both.

I'm attaching a tarball of the result of all discussion thus far.
Note that it changes KVMGROUP to "users" by default (as I suspect
the most common usecase here is a single-user devel box) and no
longer offers the option of building "all" targets -- regular qemu
should be used for that.

-RW
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