So after my previous post about virtualisation software I decided to spend some extra time on trying out KVM, manually. Having to manually set the macaddress every time is a bit obnoxious but thanks to alias I can do that at least somewhat fine.
KVM is also tremendously faster compared with QEmu 0.10 using kqemu; I’m curious to see how the thing will change with the new 2.6.29 kernel where QEmu will be able to use the KVM device itself. At any rate, the speed of FreeBSD in the KVM virtual system is almost native and worked quite nicely. It also doesn’t hog the CPU when it’s idling, which is quite fine too.
As I’ve written, though, OpenSolaris also refused to start; after thinking a bit around, I thought about the amount of memory and… that was it. With the default 128MB of RAM provided by KVM and QEmu, OpenSolaris cannot even start the text-mode installation. Giving it 1 GB of memory actually made it work. Fun.
As Pavel points out in the previous post, though, the default QEmu network card will blatantly fail to work with OpenSolaris; Jürgen is right when he says that OpenSolaris is quite picky with its hardware. At any rate the default network card for KVM (RTL8169) seems to work just fine. And networking is not lagged like it is on VirtualBox, at all.
I’ve now been working on getting Gentoo Prefix on it already, and then I’ll probably resume my work on getting FFmpeg to build, since I need that to work on lscube . For now, though, it’s more a matter to have it installed.
Later this week I’ll probably also make use of its availability to work on Ruby-Elf more and in particular on the two scripts I want to write to help identify ABI changes and symbol collisions inside a given executable, that I promised in the other previous post .