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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by SMcCandlish (talk | contribs) at 10:57, 14 June 2016 (typo). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Politics behind kvm inclusion decision?

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'm thinking it's because Xen made a deal with Microsoft - certainly, that seems to be what the latest Linux Format magazine is implying... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 83.104.34.212 (talk) 14:53, 17 February 2007 (UTC).[reply]
It's simpler --Treekids 19:04, 21 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Needed info

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

  • What OS can run under the VM?
  • What's the license on the code? GPL or other?

I couldn't access the project homepage or else I would have looked it up myself. - Taxman Talk 18:17, 31 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Pretty much any OS- KVM provides the guest OS with a fairly vanilla PC (via QEMU's I/O module) that pretty much any PC OS can run on:

i440FX host PCI bridge, PIIX3 PCI to ISA bridge, Cirrus CLGD 5446 PCI VGA card or dummy VGA card with Bochs VESA extensions, PS/2 mouse and keyboard, 2 PCI IDE interfaces with hard disk and CD-ROM support, (opt) Floppy disk, zero or more NE2000 PCI network adapters, Serial ports, (opt) Creative SoundBlaster 16 sound card, (opt) ENSONIQ AudioPCI ES1370 sound card, (opt) Adlib(OPL2), (opt) Yamaha YM3812 compatible chip, PCI UHCI USB controller and a virtual USB hub, one or more CPUs, with SMP up to 255 CPUs. --Treekids 14:36, 4 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Update

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

Usenet references

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)[reply]

Gmane is website that archives public mailing lists and provides a mail-to-NNTP gateway. Messages found on Gmane are not present on other Usenet newsservers. -- intgr [talk] 09:17, 15 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Version numbers and infoboxes

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)[reply]

---

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)[reply]

kvm-kmod is Fedora-specific. Name one other distribution that ships KVM separately from the kernel?
As explained above, the linux-kvm.org website is not even the "upstream", it's a Red Hat-owned page that doesn't lead the project or even host any development resources (bug trackers, code, mailing lists etc). kernel.org is the upstream, and they don't release kvm-kmod.
As for leavig the impression of unreleased software, the article could simply state that it's part of the kernel. Do you think that for instance the ext4 page leaves the impression that it's unreleased? -- intgr [talk] 01:04, 7 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

unload intro

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)[reply]

Is this generic?

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)[reply]

KVM was written by Qumranet, before Red hat acquired it. Because it is free software, part of the Linux kernel, any company, not just Red hat can use it or modify it - so it is by no means proprietary. Red hat does have on its payroll all the influential KVM developers, so it has significant leverage on the direction that its development is taking, but nothing is preventing other companies from chipping in. In fact, yesterday, an alliance was formed by several companies (Redhat, IBM, HP, Intel, and others) that want to develop and promote KVM - see [1] Nyh (talk) 14:11, 18 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Is information needed regarding the original author (inventor) of KVM in this article? Is that the question? Otherwise, bore others with your general questions. Does it need to be said that KVM is an open software solution for the linux kernel, another open software solution and is necessarily not proprietary (i.e. fascist, captialist, intellectual property trash)? Just ask the Free Software Foundation if they'll legally defend that statement, or read up on it, like in wikipedia.Kckid (talk) 22:29, 23 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation

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)[reply]

Does not depend on VT-X?

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)[reply]

If the official developers says something it's bound to be more accurate than a boiled down rehash of comments by the same people. The KVM site is right. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.162.60.16 (talk) 22:49, 17 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
How, is that an answer? This article doesn't make it clear. I'm going to edit.Kckid (talk) 21:30, 23 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

"offering additional visibility and storage reliability not previously available"

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)[reply]

I would agree. But, if one starts looking for this kind of thing especially, in articles connected to the software industry and business automation, it would become a life's work. Not, that I'm discouraging anyone.Kckid (talk) 21:27, 23 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

expert-subject: why?

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)[reply]

Hello! Yeah, the article is good from the point of having no factual errors. However, it's far away from providing a good coverage of the KVM. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 03:45, 6 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Article title capitalization

Moved to Talk:Kernel-based virtual machine

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)[reply]

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