Running windows programs under Linux

[Tom H]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2014 at 1:43 PM, Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote:
> At Fri, 29 Aug 2014 13:10:13 -0400 "Ubuntu user technical support, not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> On 08/29/2014 12:13 PM, Tom H wrote:
>>>
>>> The point was, and I mis-expressed myself, that I'm running kvm
>>> without having a package named "*kvm*" installed.
>>
>> Maybe I missed something. How do you run a program if you don't have
>> that program?
>
> kvm is not a 'program' (like Virtual Box or Parallels). It is *similar* to
> Xen, in that it provides virtualization at a 'kernel' level, rather than via a
> virtualization *program*. Both kvm and xen are 'native' (linux) virtualization
> systems, unlike Virtual Box or Parallels or VMWare. Xen runs as a kind of
> super-kernel with the host running as Dom0 -- that is your 'host' system is
> itself a virtual machine that is connected to all of the bare metal hardware
> (nothing is actually emulated). Kvm works differently in that there isn't a
> hypervisor running independently of the host operating system. I believe Kvm
> is directly supported by modern Linux kernels, in that the hypervisor logic is
> embeded in the host kernel itself -- no additional packages are needed to have
> Kvm functionallity.
>
> Both use a virtualization library (eg libvirt) and a hypervisor interface
> module (eg qemu) to interface between the host system and the virtual machines
> and virtual networks and virtual disks (if any). There is usually a CLI
> interface (virsh) and maybe a GUI interface (virt-manager) and some other
> assorted virt-<mumble> utilities and daemons. Both kvm and xen allow for using
> 'real' disks (or in a realistic sense, logical partitions or logical volumns)
> for the virtual machines, which is very handy for things like migration and/or
> backup.
>
> So all you need to install is the hypervisor interface and support logic:
> virsh, virt-manager, and the various support libraries and daemons. This would
> be in packages like *qemu* or *libvirt* or virt-manager, none of which would
> necessarily have 'kvm' as part of their names (they might depending on how
> things might have been packaged). The only difference between kvm and xen is
> that xen needs the super-kernel/hypervisor (xen itself, which requires
> additional magic with grub using multiboot [grumble]), and needs a xen
> capable kernel (modern Linux kernels include the xen support modules, etc.).

Thanks for saving me from having to write all of this! :)

One thing though: "virsh, virt-manager, and the various support
libraries and daemons" aren't needed, strictly speaking but they're
nice to have.