[Mageia-dev] qemu new upstream release (1.0-rc1) and should we move from qemu-kvm to qemu?

[Kamil Rytarowski]

Let me paste from the Arch Linux wiki documentation:

--
Difference between qemu and qemu-kvm

Depending on your needs, you can choose either to install upstream qemu 
or qemu-kvm from the official repositories.

Upstream QEMU is a pure emulator, with no hardware acceleration. qemu 
versions < 0.15.0 do have initial KVM support when QEMU is started with 
the -enable-kvm parameter, but this implementation is still buggy and 
nowhere as complete as in qemu-kvm, as many functions still do not work. 
Starting with qemu version 0.15.0, the qemu-kvm tree has been fully 
integrated with the qemu tree, and there should not be any difference 
between qemu -enable-kvm and qemu-kvm. See the [QEMU changelog] for more 
details.

Upstream QEMU is capable of emulating many different platforms (arm, 
i386, m68k, mips, ppc, sparc, x86_64, etc). On the other hand, you have 
qemu-kvm, which is qemu (i386 and x86_64 architecture support only) with 
KVM (kernel-based virtual machine) additions, allowing you to run 
virtual machines at close to native speed. qemu-kvm is the version you 
want if you have a CPU that supports hardware virtualization and you 
only need to run virtual machines for the i386 and x86_64 architectures 
(Linux, Windows, BSD, etc).

Not all processors support KVM. You will need an x86-based machine 
running a recent ( >= 2.6.22 ) Linux kernel on an Intel processor with 
VT-x (virtualization technology) extensions or an AMD processor with SVM 
(Secure Virtual Machine) extensions (also called AMD-V). Xen has a 
complete list of compatible processors. For Intel processors, see also 
the Intel® Virtualization Technology List.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU#Difference_between_qemu_and_qemu-kvm
--


And now from the qemu changelog
~~
KVM
Common

     Countless fixes ported over from qemu-kvm, core is now shared with 
that tree, i.e. has the same quality
     Pimped up threading model, now fully synchronized with qemu-kvm tree
     Removed dependency on external kernel headers, all supported KVM 
features are now built into the binary

http://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/0.15#KVM
~~

What do you think? Can we move?

There is also one important patch missed in Mageia - 
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2011-11/msg00787.html it's 
dependency for the GNS3 simulator. OpenSUSE already includes it 
https://build.opensuse.org/package/files?package=qemu&project=openSUSE%3ATools

If nobody is against I will do it and contact the maintainer (misc).