On 11/03/2009 09:50 AM, Alexander Graf wrote:
Ok, imagine this was not this unloved S390 odd architecture but X86.
The only output choices you have are:
1) virtio-console
2) VNC / SSH over network
3) virtio-fb
Now you want to configure a server, probably using yast and all those
nice graphical utilities, but still enable a firewall so people
outside don't intrude your machine. Well, you managed to configure the
firewall by luck to allow VNC, but now you reconfigured it and
something broke - but VNC was your only chance to access the machine.
Oops...
x86 has real framebuffers, so software and people expect it. s390
doesn't. How do people manage now?
You also want to see boot messages, have a console login screen,
virtio-console does that, except for the penguins. Better, since you
can scroll back.
It doesn't do graphics. Ever used yast in text mode?
Once you're in, start ssh+X or vnc. Again, what do people do now?
The hardware model isn't exactly new either. It's just the next
logical step to a full PV machine using virtio. If the virtio-fb
stuff turns out to be really fast and reliable, I could even imagine
it being the default target for kvm on ppc as well, as we can't
switch resolutions on the fly there atm.
We could with vmware-vga.
The vmware-port stuff is pretty much tied onto X86. I don't think
modifying EAX is that easy on PPC ;-).
Yes, though we can probably make it work on ppc with minimal modifications.
Why? the guest will typically have networking when it's set up, so
it should have network access during install. You can easily use
slirp redirection and the built-in dhcp server to set this up with
relatively few hassles.
That's how I use it right now. It's no fun.
The toolstack should hide the unfun parts.
You can't hide guest configuration. We as a distribution control the
kernel. We don't control the user's configuration as that's by design
the user's choice. The only thing we can do is give users meaningful
choices to choose from - and having graphics available is definitely
one of them.
Well, if the user chooses not to have networking then vnc or ssh+x
definitely fail. That would be a strange choice for a server machine.
Seriously, try to ask someone internally to get access to an S390. I
think you'll understand my motivations a lot better after having used
it for a bit.
I actually have a s390 vm (RHEL 4 IIRC). It acts just like any other
remote machine over ssh except that it's especially slow (probably the
host is overloaded). Of course I wouldn't dream of trying to install
something like that though.
--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function
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