Boxes question & emulation

[Chris Murphy]

On Dec 3, 2013, at 8:39 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 2013-12-03 at 08:44 -0800, Antonio Olivares wrote:
>> Dear folks, 
>> 
>> I see that Boxes is a built in emulator and I was testing it trying to
>> run ReactOS on it, but did not succeed running it.  I see that there
>> are qemu packages for ReactOS, and was wondering if Boxes uses qemu or
>> a different technology.  I know that Virtualbox also exists, but for
>> Fedora 20, the rpms don't exist yet :(
>> Is there a wiki, or a howto for boxes on how to do things?
> 
> Boxes uses libvirt, qemu and KVM, the same stack used by virt-manager.
> It should have Help as all GNOME apps do. I think mostly testers use
> virt-manager more than Boxes, though; we've tested Boxes out a bit, but
> I know I use virt-manager for my day-to-day stuff.
> 
> VirtualBox is available from third-party repositories, it is not
> packaged in Fedora because it relies on out of tree kernel modules. It's
> quite popular among some users, but I know the Fedora kernel and virt
> devs consider it bad code.

I'm a virsh convert. I used to use mainly VirtualBox on OS X but the whole F20 cycle I've been using virsh and TigerVNC to manage F20 VM's on a remote computer running F20. VBox is OK but was a resource pig, it'd regularly bust 50% or more CPU even though the OS in the VM wasn't doing anything.

Chris Murphy