On 08/04/2010 09:51 AM, David S. Ahern wrote:
On 08/03/10 12:43, Avi Kivity wrote:
libguestfs does not depend on an x86 architectural feature.
qemu-system-x86_64 emulates a PC, and PCs don't have -kernel. We should
discourage people from depending on this interface for production use.
That is a feature of qemu - and an important one to me as well. Why
should it be discouraged? You end up at the same place -- a running
kernel and in-ram filesystem; why require going through a bootloader
just because the hardware case needs it?
It's smoke and mirrors. We're still providing a boot loader it's just a
little tiny one that we've written soley for this purpose.
And it works fine for production use. The question is whether we ought
to be aggressively optimizing it for large initrd sizes. To be honest,
after a lot of discussion of possibilities, I've come to the conclusion
that it's just not worth it.
There are better ways like using string I/O and optimizing the PIO path
in the kernel. That should cut down the 1s slow down with a 100MB
initrd by a bit. But honestly, shaving a couple hundred ms further off
the initrd load is just not worth it using the current model.
If this is important to someone, we ought to look at refactoring the
loader completely to be disk based which is a higher performance interface.
Regards,
Anthony Liguori
David
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