Seems like that one way or another a common “column” on my blog is reserved to virtualisation issues. I blogged a lot about VirtualBox (before dissing it finally), and then I moved on to KVM and QEmu.
Last time I blogged about it, I was still unable to get NetBSD to detect any network card with KVM, while I had OpenSolaris, FreeBSD and Ubuntu working fine. I also had some problems with Gentoo/FreeBSD and the KVM video emulation. But since then, stuff changed, in particular, QEmu now supports KVM technologies natively (and it’s not yet updated to the latest version). Let’s see if this changed something.
Thanks to aperez I now know how to get NetBSD to identify the network card: disabling ACPI. Unfortunately disabling ACPI with KVM freezes the boot. And I want to use VDE for networking since I already have Yamato configured as a router and file server for the whole network, which seems to fail when using NetBSD with QEmu: while dhcpd receives the requests, the replies never reach NetBSD, and I’m stuck for now. I’m going to try again with the newer QEmu version. Also, out of all the cards I tried in QEmu, the Intel E1000 fails because it cannot find the EEPROM.
The Gentoo/FreeBSD video problem that stopped me from using vim during the configuration phase on the minimal CD does not happen when using QEmu; on the other hand since the SDL output is tremendously slow, I’m using the VNC support; quite nice if it wasn’t that Vinagre does not seem to support VNC over Unix sockets, which would make the whole configuration much nicer, without consuming precious network ports. I have to see if I just missed something, and if I didn’t, I should either request for it to be added, or write the support myself (even better). I guess that the underlying code supports the Unix socket since I expect the virt-manager to use that to communicate with the VM.
Speaking of which, I haven’t looked at virt-manager or anything in quite a while; I should see if they still insist on not giving me the choice of just using VDE for networking instead of dnsmasq and similar; for now the whole configuration is done manually with a series of aliases in my ~/.shrc file, with (manually) sequential MAC addresses hardcoded, as well as VNC ports, LVM volumes (used for the virtual disks, seem to be quite faster than using a file over VFS), and hostnames (in /etc/hosts beside for Ubuntu that has Avahi working).
I have to admit, though, that I have some doubts about the performances of QEmu/KVM versus the usual KVM, at least it’s taking quite a long time to unpack the tarball with the stage3 of Gentoo/FreeBSD 7.1. I hope I/O is the bottleneck here.
Speaking of I/O as bottleneck, I was finally able to get a gigabit switch for the office, the next step is to buy some many metres of cable so I can actually wire up my bedroom with the office, passing through a few other rooms of the house so that I can actually have a fast enough network for all the computers in their standard setup (and use wireless only when strictly needed). Although I do have some doubts about this since I really want to move out.
In the mean time, Enterprise is soon going to be re-used as a backup box, I just need to find an easy way to send a WOL packet, wait for the box to come up, backup everything, and shut down, once a week. I have the last unused 500GB disk on that box so it should be easy. But I’d like to have an mtree of the data that has been backed up, which I’m still unsure on how to get.
