Re: [Qemu-devel] What is the minimal linux setup for running Qemu ?

[Richard Neill]

Dear Mohammad,

My understanding of this is that you are trying to maximise the emulated 
performance. In general, QEmu imposes a performance penalty of (roughly) 
a factor of 4, so if you want good performance on the guest, you need 
Pentium-4 class hardware for the host, with at least 512 MB RAM.

On a system of this level, wasted disk space is probably not too much of 
an issue, so trying to pare down your distro to the bare minimum may 
well not help much. Eg having unncessary libraries on the system won't 
matter at all, if they just take up a 100 MB of disk space.

Likewise, having unnecessary kernel modules compiled on your system 
won't matter, if they aren't actually loaded at the time. That said, if 
you compile the kernel yourself with all the optimisations for your 
system, you'll do better than a distro-supplied kernel.

Running a regular X-server is actually more efficient than the 
frame-buffer device. The FB is simpler and uses less disk space, but 
performance isn't quite so good.

What will probably help most is killing off unneeded processes, stopping 
unwanted daemons (to free up RAM), and running a simple window manager 
(eg icewm; fvwm2) rather than KDE.

Another way to obtain a (fairly) minimal system easily would be to 
install the base distro of, say Mandrake, and let the packaging tool 
resolve the dependencies of qemu. [You'd then need to upgrade to the 
latest qemu version].

Lastly, have you checked out Metropipe's product? This (free) package 
from:  http://www.metropipe.net/ProductsPVPM.shtml
contains:
        All that is needed to run Qemu under Linux
        All that is needed to run Qemu under Windows
        A Linux Guest system.
And it fits on a USB key.


I hope that's useful.

Regards

Richard




Khan, Mohammad wrote:
> I'm wondering about what the minimum requirements are for Linux host to
> be able to run Qemu?  The idea is to have a less resource hungry host so
> that the guests would have more resources. Is an X server required? Can
> a frame buffer device be used for guest display instead? What parts of
> kernel or libraries can be removed. How about such a minimalist distro
> which only runs Qemu and related untilities?
> Any comments.
> Mohammad
>  
>
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Richard Neill, Trinity College, Cambridge, CB21TQ, U.K.