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I've seen some articles mention that Xen wanted to be included in the kernel for years, and instead a fairly new component, KVM, gets included.
I was wondering what the background/politics that lead to decision are? It might be an interesting addition to this article.
I would like to see a Plain English introduction that explains in layman's terms what KVM means - so far this article starts out loaded with acronyms and terms that are obscure to the moderately educated computer user. Thanks, Walt Bankes
I couldn't access the project homepage or else I would have looked it up myself. - Taxman Talk 18:17, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I've updated the page considerably to reflect the progress currently made. Feedback would be useful here. Provided that there are no objections to the current content, I'd like to extend it more in the near future.-- Anthony Liguori 00:51, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
Yes, this page needs lot of updating, it is severely lacking in detail; check how detailed [[Xen] is written. Raghu Udiyar ( talk) 13:49, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
This page makes extensive references to usenet posts, via the Gmane site. Why that one, instead of the more common (and possible longerlived) google groups archive or a honest-to-god standardised news:// link (which last, admittedly, will be problematic to retrieve for many people)? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.101.113.45 ( talk) 22:16, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
Yes I saw the download page. It explicitly states "The kernel modules can be found in kvm-kmod-<kernel version>. A kernel version of 2.6.32.3 means that these are the same modules as those included with the 2.6.32.3 kernel from www.kernel.org". In other words, kvm-kmod packages KVM kernel modules that are otherwise part of official kernel.org kernels.
And in fact the "kvm-kmod" package is Fedora-specific, other distros like Ubuntu, openSUSE and Arch Linux package these modules as part of the kernel package (look for files kvm.ko, kvm-amd.ko, kvm-intel.ko). The linux-kvm.org website is actually maintained by Red Hat so it's no surprise that they only cover Fedora there.
The problem with the infobox in the first place is that KVM is not one specific piece of software. "KVM" itself is actually a subsystem of the Linux kernel, which provides an user-space API to processor-specific virtualization technologies (VT-x and AMD-V). And then there's QEMU, which was forked into a "QEMU-KVM" project to add KVM support. QEMU-KVM is not KVM either, it's a piece of software that happens to use kernel's KVM functionality. Personally I'd just remove the version numbers from the infobox entirely because the way it's represented now is simply incorrect... But I'm not sure it will stay that way -- surely always there's someone who will add them back.
So, agree/disagree? Ideas? Alternatives? -- intgr [talk] 16:29, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
---
There is nothing Fedora specific about kvm-kmod, it is one of the upstream release packages (along with qemu-kvm).
See http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Getting_the_kvm_kernel_modules.
Dropping the version numbers is technically correct but would leave the false impression that there is no released software that can use kvm.
Your IP user 77.126.59.18 ( talk) 20:06, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Can the following "using the VirtIO framework; this includes a paravirtual Ethernet card, a disk I/O controller, a balloon device for adjusting guest memory-usage, and VGA graphics interface using VMware drivers" be moved out of the intro, to the relevant section on technical details, please ? Thanks in advance. -- Jerome Potts ( talk) 05:19, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
It seems that Red Hat was the first to implement KVM, but does that make it proprietary? The way the article was written implies that it is simply a framework, and any kernel can be used to mimic a machine in virtual space. Rajpaj ( talk) 06:45, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
I propose a disambiguation page for this article. My main reason for such a request is that KVM is in reality, a generic forecast. This article specifies only the Linux version. Rajpaj ( talk) 23:43, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
The KVM site says that you need hardware virtualization, but the first paragraph of this article suggests that you don't. Which is right? 219.90.148.160 ( talk) 11:58, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
This sounds more like advertising than anything else. In fact the page seems to have been done-over by a Solaris/BSD flag-waver, what with two backwater OpenSolaris forks appearing at the top of the "implementations" list. Ris icle ( talk) 14:47, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
There's been an "expert-subject" ({{Expert-subject|computing|date=October 2012}}) template on this page since 2012, yet it doesn't seem clear to me why. So I removed the template transclusion. -- TheAnarcat ( talk) 23:27, 5 January 2015 (UTC)
Hello, SMcCandlish! Regarding your recent renaming of the article to Kernel-based virtual machine, see, KVM actually is a proper name, because it's a specific software product (just like VMware, for example), not some kind of a virtualization concept. Thus, we should rename the article back to Kernel-based Virtual Machine. — Dsimic ( talk | contribs) 09:22, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
Mentioning 1.2.0 and 2012 as latest release seems quite misleading, perhaps we should just remove that information? That's only about the old (separate) downloads, as far as I can understand: http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Downloads Nemo 07:59, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
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VirtIO redirect to this article. There should be a section about VirtIO. Takers? 109.192.123.125 ( talk) 13:47, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
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A lot of information in this article seems to be concerned with QEMU rather than KVM. Sections "graphical management tools" and "emulated hardware" are especially irrelevant to KVM and most of their contents apply to QEMU (or qemu-kvm
). Section "emulated hardware" also contradicts with the prior statement that KVM does not perform emulation.
Magic sergeant (
talk)
03:40, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
I’ve tried to clarify the confusion about emulation mention in the note in the “Emulated Hardware” section. Please check if it is clear now and change or remove the note — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rafimoor ( talk • contribs) 04:18, 31 August 2019 (UTC) Rafimoor ( talk) 04:20, 31 August 2019 (UTC)
I'm not an expert but these two statements seem to entirely contradict each other.
"KVM provides device abstraction but no processor emulation."
and:
"KVM itself emulates very little hardware, instead deferring to a higher level client application such as QEMU, crosvm, or Firecracker for device emulation. KVM provides the following emulated devices: Virtual CPU and memory VirtIO"
This needs to be clarified because it makes no sense. 2601:646:9E01:B460:2D40:3293:BD31:BF66 ( talk) 19:22, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Kernel-based Virtual Machine article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I've seen some articles mention that Xen wanted to be included in the kernel for years, and instead a fairly new component, KVM, gets included.
I was wondering what the background/politics that lead to decision are? It might be an interesting addition to this article.
I would like to see a Plain English introduction that explains in layman's terms what KVM means - so far this article starts out loaded with acronyms and terms that are obscure to the moderately educated computer user. Thanks, Walt Bankes
I couldn't access the project homepage or else I would have looked it up myself. - Taxman Talk 18:17, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I've updated the page considerably to reflect the progress currently made. Feedback would be useful here. Provided that there are no objections to the current content, I'd like to extend it more in the near future.-- Anthony Liguori 00:51, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
Yes, this page needs lot of updating, it is severely lacking in detail; check how detailed [[Xen] is written. Raghu Udiyar ( talk) 13:49, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
This page makes extensive references to usenet posts, via the Gmane site. Why that one, instead of the more common (and possible longerlived) google groups archive or a honest-to-god standardised news:// link (which last, admittedly, will be problematic to retrieve for many people)? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.101.113.45 ( talk) 22:16, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
Yes I saw the download page. It explicitly states "The kernel modules can be found in kvm-kmod-<kernel version>. A kernel version of 2.6.32.3 means that these are the same modules as those included with the 2.6.32.3 kernel from www.kernel.org". In other words, kvm-kmod packages KVM kernel modules that are otherwise part of official kernel.org kernels.
And in fact the "kvm-kmod" package is Fedora-specific, other distros like Ubuntu, openSUSE and Arch Linux package these modules as part of the kernel package (look for files kvm.ko, kvm-amd.ko, kvm-intel.ko). The linux-kvm.org website is actually maintained by Red Hat so it's no surprise that they only cover Fedora there.
The problem with the infobox in the first place is that KVM is not one specific piece of software. "KVM" itself is actually a subsystem of the Linux kernel, which provides an user-space API to processor-specific virtualization technologies (VT-x and AMD-V). And then there's QEMU, which was forked into a "QEMU-KVM" project to add KVM support. QEMU-KVM is not KVM either, it's a piece of software that happens to use kernel's KVM functionality. Personally I'd just remove the version numbers from the infobox entirely because the way it's represented now is simply incorrect... But I'm not sure it will stay that way -- surely always there's someone who will add them back.
So, agree/disagree? Ideas? Alternatives? -- intgr [talk] 16:29, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
---
There is nothing Fedora specific about kvm-kmod, it is one of the upstream release packages (along with qemu-kvm).
See http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Getting_the_kvm_kernel_modules.
Dropping the version numbers is technically correct but would leave the false impression that there is no released software that can use kvm.
Your IP user 77.126.59.18 ( talk) 20:06, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Can the following "using the VirtIO framework; this includes a paravirtual Ethernet card, a disk I/O controller, a balloon device for adjusting guest memory-usage, and VGA graphics interface using VMware drivers" be moved out of the intro, to the relevant section on technical details, please ? Thanks in advance. -- Jerome Potts ( talk) 05:19, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
It seems that Red Hat was the first to implement KVM, but does that make it proprietary? The way the article was written implies that it is simply a framework, and any kernel can be used to mimic a machine in virtual space. Rajpaj ( talk) 06:45, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
I propose a disambiguation page for this article. My main reason for such a request is that KVM is in reality, a generic forecast. This article specifies only the Linux version. Rajpaj ( talk) 23:43, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
The KVM site says that you need hardware virtualization, but the first paragraph of this article suggests that you don't. Which is right? 219.90.148.160 ( talk) 11:58, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
This sounds more like advertising than anything else. In fact the page seems to have been done-over by a Solaris/BSD flag-waver, what with two backwater OpenSolaris forks appearing at the top of the "implementations" list. Ris icle ( talk) 14:47, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
There's been an "expert-subject" ({{Expert-subject|computing|date=October 2012}}) template on this page since 2012, yet it doesn't seem clear to me why. So I removed the template transclusion. -- TheAnarcat ( talk) 23:27, 5 January 2015 (UTC)
Hello, SMcCandlish! Regarding your recent renaming of the article to Kernel-based virtual machine, see, KVM actually is a proper name, because it's a specific software product (just like VMware, for example), not some kind of a virtualization concept. Thus, we should rename the article back to Kernel-based Virtual Machine. — Dsimic ( talk | contribs) 09:22, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
Mentioning 1.2.0 and 2012 as latest release seems quite misleading, perhaps we should just remove that information? That's only about the old (separate) downloads, as far as I can understand: http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Downloads Nemo 07:59, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
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VirtIO redirect to this article. There should be a section about VirtIO. Takers? 109.192.123.125 ( talk) 13:47, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
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Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 03:19, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
A lot of information in this article seems to be concerned with QEMU rather than KVM. Sections "graphical management tools" and "emulated hardware" are especially irrelevant to KVM and most of their contents apply to QEMU (or qemu-kvm
). Section "emulated hardware" also contradicts with the prior statement that KVM does not perform emulation.
Magic sergeant (
talk)
03:40, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
I’ve tried to clarify the confusion about emulation mention in the note in the “Emulated Hardware” section. Please check if it is clear now and change or remove the note — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rafimoor ( talk • contribs) 04:18, 31 August 2019 (UTC) Rafimoor ( talk) 04:20, 31 August 2019 (UTC)
I'm not an expert but these two statements seem to entirely contradict each other.
"KVM provides device abstraction but no processor emulation."
and:
"KVM itself emulates very little hardware, instead deferring to a higher level client application such as QEMU, crosvm, or Firecracker for device emulation. KVM provides the following emulated devices: Virtual CPU and memory VirtIO"
This needs to be clarified because it makes no sense. 2601:646:9E01:B460:2D40:3293:BD31:BF66 ( talk) 19:22, 7 July 2024 (UTC)