Entries Tagged 'Kvm' ↓

kvm vs qemu-kvm vs kvm-kmod

Ubuntu recently change their package names for kvm.  This comment posted on qemu-0.11.0 Released provides an explanation:

qemu-kvm includes features and fixes from upstream qemu and so takes its naming scheme from upstream qemu. You can think of it as qemu optimized for kvm. Note too that qemu-kvm does not include the kernel module but only the userspace and considered to be stable.

kvm-xx on the other hand is the development branch of kvm and not considered to be stable. It’s naming scheme is arbitrary and it also takes features from upstream qemu.

kvm-kmod is different to kvm-xx. You can think of kvm-kmod as a subset of the kvm-xx. KVM-xx = userspace + kernel where kvm-kmod is the kernel part of it and qemu-kvm is the userspace part (the guest process itself). You can apply the kvm-kmod to any distro version or linux version.. it’s just the kernel driver. However, without the userspace part, you can’t do much with it.

kvm disk performance with different backends

Here  some results from testing I did in August 2009 on  KVM with the three different disk image drivers. First a single disk system running Ubuntu x64 9.04:

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Redhat and KVM

Redhat has acquired Qumranet the developers of KVM. Will be interesting to see how this plays out in the Linux virtualisation world.

I haven’t tried KVM yet as I’ve been too busy and Xen is more mature – but many of the accounts I’ve read seem to indicate that for Linux its performance is very good maybe better in some cases than Xen. Management is another issue, but that is just a matter of time and development enegry.

From lwn.