QEMU 8.0 Released with More ARM and RISC-V Emulation - Slashdot

Posted by EditorDavid

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  Things are looking up. Maybe we can get parity with some of the commercial competitors.

  • Not "go", no.

    Ha ha, parity. Maybe, at that. But in the bad way. As in needless hassle because the developers lacked a clue or two. (vboxmanage, I'm looking at you.)

    Looking through the changelog, there's this little gem:

    The virtiofsd tool has been superseded by a newer implementation at https://gitlab.com/virtio-fs/virtiofsd [gitlab.com], which is stable and has a similar feature set to the daemon that was included in QEMU.

    Looking at that page, we see:

    A virtio-fs vhost-user device daemon written in Rust.[...] This project depends on

    • Re:

      You mean, they wrote a low-level, security-sensitive daemon that also needs high performance... in a language appropriate for that, instead of an inappropriate one? That's somehow a bad decision?

      The C implementation also depended on libcap-ng and libseccomp, so no. You only need the Rust toolchain to compile virtiofsd, not to install a built package, so also no.

      • Re:

        That's you putting words into GP's mouth. I have it on good authority he ment exactly what he said.

        Okay. But that means the low-level stuff is done in C, which you just called an inappropriate language for this stuff (I beg to differ, but I'll ignore that for the sake of argument), so... the benefit of externalising and switching languages was what again?

        I'm still seeing a switch from shipping something you'd really only use with the software, with the software, to externalising it, switching to another la

      • Re:

        The appropriate language for that could only be C.

        Immature fad languages have no place.

        • Re:

          Not if there's a security angle, no. C needs to die a death on everything except the embedded space.

          • Re:

            Nope, that's Rust again.
            
            Rust is a Trojan Horse hailed by idiots as a "secure" programming language because it doesn't make them think about memory allocations and pointers. A.K.A. For hand holding them through performing their literal jobs. By that logic BASIC is even more secure than Rust because some versions don't allow dynamic native code, and the most secure system is "Computer, coffee. Black." Because there is no human programmer at all. (*In most use cases.)
            
            Of course that is bullshit. Starfleet

  • Maybe we can get parity with some of the commercial competitors.

    Don't hold your breath. To this day, after many years of trying, I have still not gotten QEMU/KVM to bridge a network, either through the GUI, command-line, or configuration files. In VirtualBox, it's a single mouse click.

    I had great hopes for KVM when it was first released, but its usability is absolutely revolting compared to VirtualBox. I'm more than willing to accept VirtualBox's lower performance in exchange for its drop-dead simple usability.

    QEMU/KVM is still a non-starter after 17 years! Literally everything else is better.

    • 1 hidden comment

    • Re:

      Can't speak for you but what happened to me was that netfilter was blocking my packets. I just disabled it for bridges since I'm not using bridging firewalling on the host in question, but a more secure thing to do would be to actually set some of that up.

      • 1 hidden comment

    • You're kidding right?

      KVM blows every other hypervisor out of the water with its performance. It may not meet your use case but for serious emulation it smokes the competition. In our business we run hundreds of VMs with not a single machine crash and get near-native speed, especially with the improvements in virtiofs.

      KVM also does a great job with hardware virtualisation including PCI passthrough and can handle resource changes on-the-fly (like increasing memory to the virtual machine).

      As far as bridged networking, set up your bridge with standard linux tools and then just attach your VMs to the bridge. We don't use a GUI for KVM because libvirt is really easy from the command line and the config files are simple to work with.

      For enterprise use, it's simply the best.

      • Re:

        Usability matters, and most of the time is more important than performance.

        I planned on testing out QEMU not for virtualization, but for emulation purposes (running really old software). I downloaded a Windows-native build of QEMU and found out that each emulated platform has two executables. Nowhere in the installation directions does it say what the difference are between the two, and I couldn't find any info from various forums, either. It's like it's some kind of club secret or something. I mean, co

        • Re:

          This, oh so much.
          
          Try setting up a VM to use the host's network address without root / admin privileges. It can't be done without major hacks using the command line tools outside of KVM / libvirt. (Even then you still need root to run those commands and doing so confuses the heck out of network manager.) Under Virtualbox it's as simple as the end user clicking an option on a drop down menu.
          
          Need to set up a Win7 VM? Under KVM / libvirt you need to disable all CPU cores / threads except one, and then set

    • Re:

      Hmm.. i'm a happy user.!
      Have running qemu without major problems from early 2000 (when Linux-KVM was a seperated module).
      From version 2.6.0 have a binarie for Windows on laptop and a self build on Linux PC (slackware) both using the same images.

      Biggest archivement: Fast bootup for Windows and for stop just "kill -9" a kill / restart takes only 4 seconds.

    • Re:

      That's odd. I just installed libvirt and virt-manager on CentOS, used virt-manager to set up the VM with bridged networking and it just works. Like you say, single mouse click. In fact it's worked for over 10 years. In fact I've used it with KVM since the very beginning, back when I moved from Xen to libvirt and KVM. I can't explain why you're having those issues. Any distro that ships virt-manager and libvirt will set up the bridge automatically.

      • Re:

        I said I "just installed" I mean I simply installed libvirt and virt-manager. I've not done it in the last year or two, so may be some weird firewall issue is causing you problems. But I've certainly not heard or seen any widespead problems with folks bringing up VMs with bridged networking.

    • Re:

      Try Proxmox.
      We replaced HyperV with proxmox for about 50vms over 3 severs.
      Proxmox backup server is a treat to.