[ltp] Re: Xen or VMWare

[Andrew J. Barr]

On Wed, 2006-12-20 at 16:33 -0500, David Abrahams wrote:
> Paul Fox <pgf@foxharp.boston.ma.us> writes:
> 
> > evgeni wrote:
> >  > Did you try KVM[1]? This should work well if you have IntelVT enabled
> >  > in your BIOS (Lenovo isn't able to build a BIOS fpr my z61m with that
> >  > function *grrr*).
> >  > 
> >  > [1] http://kvm.sf.nt
> >
> > typo alert: http://kvm.sf.net
> 
> Looks nifty, really! 
> 
> But AFAICT from the (very) sparse documentation, it works by putting
> the guest OS's disk image in a file.  I don't see how that will ever
> allow me to boot directly into Windows in a pinch... or is there a way
> to use a real disk partition for the guest OS?

The innovation of KVM is the kernel module that allows use of hardware
virtualization, apart from that the userspace stuff is a slightly
modified version of qemu. As such, it works just like QEMU in that you
can specify any kind of file for a disk image--be it a image (regular)
file or a block special referring to a physical partition or disk
(e.g. /dev/sda2). You would need to set up hardware profiles on the
Windows install so that Windows can cope with the drastically different
hardware presented to  it depending on if it's being run on real
hardware or being virtualized (hence seeing the emulated set of
peripherals from QEMU). This is detailed in the VMware knowledge base,
the procedure should be reasonably similar for KVM/QEMU.

Andrew

> -- 
> Dave Abrahams
> Boost Consulting
> www.boost-consulting.com
>