Fedora And Virtualization

[Phil Meyer]

On 08/18/2009 01:59 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> (Please don't top-post, see the Guidelines).
>
> On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 15:42 -0300, Itamar Reis Peixoto wrote:
>    
>> don't use VM$#$$#$#
>>
>> please use KVM, libvirt and virt-manager
>>
>> xen is also available.
>>      
>
> Some kind of reasoned argument would be worthwhile here. I use both VBox
> and occasionally VMware because I could never get KVM to work. There
> seemed to be some key part of it missing, but it may have been just bad
> documentation.  This was a few releases back so maybe it has improved,
> but I already have my VMs set up the way I like them.
>
> For example, does KVM now support USB devices reliably? That's a
> show-stopper for me.
>
> poc
>
>    

Wrong question.

The correct question is: Has USB support been improved in qemu?
Qemu is also used by Xen.

The answer: YES!

I have successfully used a Fedora 32 bit VM to install to a USB key on a 
64 bit host.  Very cool.  I passed the usb host:vendor_id:device_id info 
from lsusb to qemu and it worked like a charm.

 From my tests on building embedded systems and a few other VMs, KVM was 
far and away faster than the VMware I tested, and setting up XEN seems 
superfluous;  there is simply no advantage that I know of, except that 
XEN is kept up in RHE/Centos whereas KVM is not.  You would need a 
2.6.20 or greater kernel, which RHE 5.X won't have.

Good luck!

Here is the snippet from the qemu man page:

        USB options:

        -usb
            Enable the USB driver (will be the default soon)

        -usbdevice devname
            Add the USB device devname.

            "mouse"
                Virtual Mouse. This will override the PS/2 mouse 
emulation when
                activated.

            "tablet"
                Pointer device that uses absolute coordinates (like a
                touchscreen). This means qemu is able to report the mouse
                position without having to grab the mouse. Also 
overrides the
                PS/2 mouse emulation when activated.

            "disk:[format=format]:file"
                Mass storage device based on file. The optional format 
argument
                will be used rather than detecting the format. Can be 
used to
                specifiy format=raw to avoid interpreting an untrusted 
format
                header.

            "host:bus.addr"
                Pass through the host device identified by bus.addr (Linux
                only).

            "host:vendor_id:product_id"
                Pass through the host device identified by 
vendor_id:product_id
                (Linux only).

            "serial:[vendorid=vendor_id][,productid=product_id]:dev"
                Serial converter to host character device dev, see "-serial"
                for the available devices.

            "braille"
                Braille device.  This will use BrlAPI to display the braille
                output on a real or fake device.

            "net:options"
                Network adapter that supports CDC ethernet and RNDIS 
protocols.