On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 05:12:30PM -0400, Bill Davidsen wrote: > Daniel P. Berrange wrote: > >On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 10:57:50AM -0700, jd wrote: > >>Hi > >> What is the motivation for having different kvm binary names on > >> various linux distributions.. ? > >>-- kvm > >>-- qemu-system-x86_84 > >>-- qemu-kvm > > > >I can tell you the history from the Fedora POV at least... > > > >We already had 'qemu', 'qemu-system-x86_64', etc from the existing > >plain qemu emulator RPMs we distributed. > > > >The KVM makefile creates a binary call qemu-system-x86_64 but this > >clashes with the existing QEMU RPM, so we had to rename it somehow > >to allow parallel installation of KVM and QEMU RPMs. > > > >KVM already ships with a python script called 'kvm' and we didn't > >want to clash with that either, so we eventually settled on calling > >it 'qemu-kvm'. Other distros didn't worry about clash with the python > >script so called their binary just 'kvm' > > > Don't stop there, why does Fedora have both "qemu-ppc" and > "qemu-system-ppc" and so forth? There are many of these, "arm" and "m68k" > for instance. On x86 I assume that they are both emulated, and they are not > two names for the same executable or such, so what are they and how to > choose which to use? Those are totally different things. qemu-$ARCH is a userspace emulator, while qemu-system-$ARCH is a full machine emulator. The userspace emulator lets you directly execute binaries from the other non-native arch. The machine emulator provides a complete virtual machine where you can rnu an entire OS. Daniel -- |: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://ovirt.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :| -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
