[fedora-virt] release notes virt passage seems overly pessimistic

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sun, 22 Nov 2009, Dale Bewley wrote:

> ----- "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote:
> > reading here:
> >
> > http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f12/en-US/html/sect-Release_Notes-Virtualization.html
> >
> > down at the bottom:
> >
> > "KVM requires hardware virtualization features in the host system.
> >
> > Systems lacking hardware virtualization do not support Xen guests
> > at this time."
> >
> >   if one is new to virt, that could be read as, "without HW virt,
> > you're pretty much screwed."  or could that be worded a bit
> > differently?
>
> This is the same text carried over from 10 and 11.
>
> http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f10/en_US/What_Do_System_Adminstrators_Care_About.html#sn-Virtualization
>
> While Xen does not require hardware support, KVM still (always
> will?) does. Xen guests on Fedora still require KVM-based xenner.
> There has been success with Xen dom0 on experimental 3rd party
> kernels, but that may be beyond the scope of the release notes. We
> wouldn't want it to be inferred as a recommendation.
>
> Hopefully the F13 release notes will be able to describe native
> support for Xen dom0 hosts.
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue202#No_Xen_dom0_in_Fedora_12_Hopefully_13
>
> If you have any suggestions for further improvement to the release
> notes, please keep them coming.

  for people new to virtualization, i was simply suggesting that that
wording still leaves some doubt as to what's possible.

  what about a slightly longer explanation which describes what you
can support based on the capabilities of your system, as in:

  1) if your system supports H/W virtualization, you can do the
following:

     ... list of things ...

  2) if your system does *not* support H/W virtualization, you are
limited to the following:

     ... much shorter list ...

  that should be written for the newbie since the most frustrating
experience for beginners is to invest considerable time trying to do
something, only to eventually learn that it wasn't possible all along.

  i'm thinking a page entitled something like "So, you have a computer
and you want to get into virtualization."  does such a page exist?

rday
--

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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

            Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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