F15 / VirtualBox

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 12:06:02PM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> So my guess would be to make kvm/qemu bigger.. make it work in Windows.

Apart from WinKVM already mentioned, you can run straight qemu on
Windows.  It works like a charm, not very fast, but good enough for
testing things.  We are even able to cross-compile it using the Fedora
Windows cross-compiler project!

The story with the higher level management tools is not very good.

You can compile libvirt on Windows (in fact, we cross-compile it in
Fedora -- see mingw32-libvirt).  However this only includes the client
side library.  Useful for connecting to remote libvirt instances
running on real operating systems, but the daemon *cannot* be compiled
on Windows meaning you can't control a local qemu.exe.

virt-manager would in theory work on Windows (using eg. Active
Python).  Since we're only interested in cross-compiling things
[treating Windows as a weird badly-behaved embedded OS] we can't do
that, because Python itself has a broken build system that doesn't
understand cross-compilation [Python issues 5404, 1597850].

Cross-compiling any C program that uses libvirt is usually easy.  I've
also had the OCaml programs like virt-top and guestfs-browser
cross-compiled to Windows.  The OCaml cross-chain isn't in Fedora, but
ironically Debian took that work and ran with it, and they provide a
decent OCaml cross-chain now.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
New in Fedora 11: Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows
programs, test, and build Windows installers. Over 70 libraries supprt'd
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW http://www.annexia.org/fedora_mingw