Hi all, Weâre proud to announce the second version of the Native Linux KVM tool! Weâre now officially aiming for merging to mainline in 3.1. Highlights: - Experimental GUI support using SDL and VNC - SMP support. tools/kvm/ now has a highly scalable, largely lockless driver interface and the individual drivers are using finegrained locks. - TAP-based virtio networking - Fast QCOW2 image read-write support beating Qemu in fio benchmarks. See the following URL for test result details: https://gist.github.com/1026888 - Virtio-9p support for host filesystem access in guests - Virtio Random Number Generator - Host block devices as in-memory copy-on-write guest images on 64-bit hosts 1. To try out the tool, clone the git repository: git clone git://github.com/penberg/linux-kvm.git or alternatively, if you already have a kernel source tree: git remote add kvm-tool git://github.com/penberg/linux-kvm.git git remote update git checkout -b kvm-tool/master kvm-tool 2. Compile the tool: cd tools/kvm && make 3. Download a raw userspace image: Minimal: wget http://wiki.qemu.org/download/linux-0.2.img.bz2 && bunzip2 linux-0.2.img.bz2 Debian Squeeze QCOW2 image: wget http://people.debian.org/~aurel32/qemu/i386/debian_squeeze_i386_standard.qcow2 4. Build a kernel with the following options: CONFIG_VIRTIO_BLK=y CONFIG_VIRTIO_NET=y CONFIG_VIRTIO_CONSOLE=y CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_CONSOLE=y CONFIG_HW_RANDOM_VIRTIO=y CONFIG_FB_VESA=y Note: also make sure you have CONFIG_EXT2_FS or CONFIG_EXT4_FS if you use the above images. 5. And finally, launch the hypervisor: ./kvm run -d linux-0.2.img or ./kvm run -d debian_squeeze_i386_standard.qcow2 or sudo ./kvm run -d linux-0.2.img -n virtio This release was brought to you by the following people: Sasha Levin Pekka Enberg Asias He Prasad Joshi Cyrill Gorcunov Ingo Molnar John Floren Amos Kong Giuseppe Calderaro Amerigo Wang Paul Bolle David Ahern Most of us developers are hanging out on #pvm channel at irc.freenode.net if you want to drop by for questions, comments, and bug reports. Pekka -- 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