[fedora-virt] qemu user emulation test package, and is GUEST_BASE broken?

[Bill Davidsen]

Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> Hi Robert,
>
> On Wed, 2009-04-08 at 08:50 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>   
>> moving on, i'm continuing to document QEMU on f11 here:
>>
>>   http://www.crashcourse.ca/wiki/index.php/QEMU_on_Fedora_11
>>
>> and i have (unsurprisingly) a couple of questions.
>>     
>
> Interestingly, a lot of what you're documenting here is quite the
> opposite to what we want "Fedora virtualization experience" to be e.g.:
>
>   - Users shouldn't necessarily need to know what QEMU is - using 
>     virt-manager and virsh more or less makes what hypervisor is
>     underneath not terribly important
>
>   
The problem is that all these tools are designed to hide the details 
from the casual user, but they wind up making use of the details 
difficult or impossible for someone who is trying to actually use some 
of the nifty features in KVM (as an example).
>   - We'd recommend people do "yum install Virtualization" rather than 
>     manually installing individual RPMs
>
>   - We don't see "user emulation mode" as being very important - I'd 
>     really be very surprised if many people use it
>
>   - We think virt-manager is a much more useful tool for most people 
>     than qemu-launcher
>   

It's only useful if what you want to do is have a human at a console 
launch and control virtual operations which are define at the time the 
human is doing the control. That's not always the case in a more complex 
environment, where it's sometimes desirable to do things from scripts or 
programs without a human in the loop.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
  CTO TMR Associates, Inc

"You are disgraced professional losers. And by the way, give us our money back."
    - Representative Earl Pomeroy,  Democrat of North Dakota
on the A.I.G. executives who were paid bonuses  after a federal bailout.