ubuntu virtualization options when no HW virt support?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i wanted to put together a short document on simple virt options on
ubuntu and wanted to start with what you could do with a simple
32-bit system with no HW virtualization support.

  if memory serves, stock qemu doesn't require HW virt support, so i'm
certainly free to use qemu as the "simplest" possible solution.  but
these days, ubuntu has taken to bundling qemu with kvm (for acceptable
reasons, i might add).  the actual package these days is qemu-kvm, but
checking the page info shows:

"KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization
solution for Linux hosts on x86 (32 and 64-bit) hardware.

"KVM is intended for systems where the processor has hardware support
for virtualization, see below for details.  All combinations of 32-bit
and 64-bit host and guest systems are supported, except 64-bit guests
on 32-bit hosts.

"KVM requires your system to support hardware virtualization, provided
by AMD's SVM capability or Intel's VT."

  so, if i follow this, i can run qemu with no HW virt support, but if
i want to improve qemu's performance with kvm (as most people will
want to do), then *that* requies HW virt support, is that about right?

rday

p.s.  i think this is clarified by what i read over at qemu.org:

"When used as a virtualizer, QEMU achieves near native performances by
executing the guest code directly on the host CPU. QEMU supports
virtualization when executing under the Xen hypervisor or using the
KVM kernel module in Linux. When using KVM, QEMU can virtualize x86,
server and embedded PowerPC, and S390 guests."

  so qemu itself doesn't need HW virt, but taking advantage of KVM
*would*.  i think.

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

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