Re: [Qemu-devel] Current differences between qemu --enable-kvm and qemu-kvm?

[Jan Kiszka]

On 2012-05-22 07:34, Jan Kiszka wrote:
> On 2012-05-22 07:04, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
>> On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Erik Rull <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> is there a summary existing that shows up the rough or actual differences
>>> between qemu --enable-kvm and qemu-kvm? I tested both versions with the same
>>> compile and start options, the CPU performance results are identical, only
>>> the bootup time of my guest system with qemu-kvm seemed to be a bit faster
>>> (not measured, it just feeled so).
> 
> Current upstream does not enable the in-kernel irqchip of KVM by
> default. This should explain the difference in boot-up times. Try
> "-machine accel=kvm,kernel_irqchip=on". But the default will be on, just
> like in qemu-kvm, once [1] is merged.
> 
>>
>> For production KVM instances I think it still makes sense to use
>> qemu-kvm packages from your distro or qemu-kvm upstream source.
>>
>> Jan Kiszka has reduced the delta between qemu.git and qemu-kvm.git to
>> the point where I think the list of differences is rather small -
>> maybe PCI passthrough stuff, irqfd for vhost-net (which is now also
>> being upstreamed into qemu.git), and a few other things I don't know
>> of.
> 
> Right, the list of differences is dramatically shrinking. As stated in
> [2], soon only PCI passthrough and legacy interface dependencies on
> qemu-kvm will be the remaining reasons to use it. If we are lucky, PCI
> passthrough will also make it into upstream for QEMU 1.2, we are working
> on this.
> 
>>
>> For development most patches should be against qemu.git unless they
>> have a dependency on qemu-kvm.git code.
> 
> Yes, unless you are working on the upstream merge itself, there is
> practically no reason anymore to develop against qemu-kvm directly.
> 
> Jan
> 
> [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.kvm.devel/91171
> [2] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.kvm.devel/91026
> 

I've added some more details on this to the QEMU wiki, see
http://wiki.qemu.org/KVM.

BTW, if someone could have a look at the VGA diffs and resolve them,
that would be great. Gerd, what's the state of switching the BIOS?

Jan

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