Virtualization without extensions?

[Kent Borg]

Patton Echols wrote:
> My server is still running 9.10, so it looks like I could build 
> rebuild qemu from source and enable kqemu, but that defeats my purpose.

I don't understand the details there, but it reminds me of an advantage 
of compiling your own qemu: it is possible to have more than one version 
on your computer at the same time. So one can test a new version without 
disturbing existing VMs. One can migrate VMs one at a time. (Simple 
shutdown-restart migration in this case, no fancy live-migration.)

> There is a comment at the top of that page that suggests that qemu 
> would run without either kvm or kqemu -- just that it would run 
> poorly. Since I am just interested in testing some web apps, poor 
> performance might not be much of an issue. Any thought on that?

I think performance is orders of magnitude slower to emulate 
instructions one-by-one without kqemu. Qemu is impressive in that mode 
(typical Android development is to run Arm code emulated in an x86 
qemu...it does work...eventually), but there are limits, it is not fast.

> I suppose my other alternative would be to do my testing in a VM under 
> VirtualBox on my desktop.

You get the equivalent of kqemu with Virtualbox. (Also as a module, like 
kqemu.)


-kb