Re: [Qemu-devel] QEMU For Windows

[Cumberland, Lonnie]

Hi Stefan,

Thanks for getting back to me regarding your QEMU on Windows.

I actually do realize that QEMU on a Windows os is much slower, but I have 
limited options in this area as the basis of the project (which will take a 
fair amount of time and effort to get going) is to have a Type 2 Hypervisor 
something like QEMU or Virtualbox which is able to co-exist, and run 
concurrently, with commodity Windows Desktop systems. I also have been 
considering CoLinux, AndLinux, and SpeedLinux for a possible starting point as 
well.  For pure linux based machines, as Type 1 Hypervisor like Xen might do 
the job, but currently I want to go with a development that will allow the VM  
to run concurrently with Windows.

The project goal is to develop a distributed shared memory shared resource SSI 
system such that one massive virtual computer can span a great many desktops 
and dedicated systems.  It's a very ambitious and long-term project and I am 
just trying to determine the best existing VM from which to start the effort 
for which it looked as though QEMU, although slower on Windows machines, has 
the best cross platform as well as a code-base that is not overly heavy like 
Virtualbox.

Thanks for the links and I will start looking into the information.

If you have any suggestions on a possible approach towards these goals then I 
would be happy to hear them as well.

Cheers and have a great day,
Lonnie 

-----Original Message-----
From: Stefan Weil [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2013 12:39 PM
To: Cumberland, Lonnie
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] QEMU For Windows

Am 04.12.2013 16:30, schrieb Cumberland, Lonnie:
>
> Greetings All,
>
> I hope that you are well today.
>
> For a learning/development project, I am interested in the "QEMU for 
> Windows" which is being developed by Stefan Weil as I think that it 
> would make a great starting point. I found the latest code at:
>
> http://qemu.weilnetz.de/
>
> and would like to discuss with Stefan Weil, or perhaps other, the 
> particulars of how to set up the development environment which I 
> presume is MinGW to compile the 32-bit and 64-bit binaries.
>
> Would you please advise me on how I can move forward on this as my 
> project that I have in mind will need to modify qemu in a number of ways.
>
> In the first steps, I would like to spend some time to get familiar 
> with the qemu code base after which I will investigate modifications 
> that I would like to make. In particular, I am very interested in 
> developing a version of Qemu to incorporate true SMP towards my 
> project goals of a SSI (Single System Image) distributed cluster 
> system using QEMU as the SSI VM. That's the eventual goal, at least.
>
> Kind Regards and have a great day my friends,
>
> Lonnie T. Cumberland
>

Hi Lonnie,

please start with reading the available documentation, especially these
pages:

http://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/GettingStartedDevelopers
http://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/W32

I strongly suggest using Linux instead of Windows if your project is based on 
x86 hardware, because QEMU on Windows is much slower than QEMU on Linux with 
KVM hardware virtualization. Even for building Windows binaries, Linux is the 
better build platform. The QEMU binaries for Windows on qemu.weilnetz.de are 
built with MinGW-w64 on a server running Debian/GNU Linux (wheezy), the code is 
from my personal QEMU repository git://repo.or.cz/qemu/ar7.git.

Best regards,
Stefan Weil