QEMU USENIX Paper

Fabrice's USENIX QEMU paper is now freely available.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

QEMU on steroids

First there was QEMU that provided a fairly fast emulation of x86 hardware using a technique called "dynamic translation". Then came kqemu (or QEMU Accelerator Module) that allowed user code (ring 3) to run directly on the actual hardware providing speedups of around 3-5 times. Now comes the -kernel-kqemu option that allows even some of kernel code (ring 0) to run directly on the actual hardware providing impressive speedups over the old kqemu. Of course, these speedups come at the cost of affecting the stability of the host OS because of bugs in kqemu. kqemu is also not Free software, though it is free (gratis) for non-commercial uses.

In other news, GCC's SVN repository is also available for read-only access via HTTP for those who are stuck behind corporate firewalls and want access to the latest sources without having to download weekly snapshots. Of course, this is slower than the SVN protocol and might also be pulled off if it contributes too much to the load on the server.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

New Software

SeaMonkey is the new avatar of the Mozilla Application Suite, kept alive by people who prefer the old monolithic application approach to the new approach of having standalone browser (Firefox), mail client (Thunderbird), etc. components. SeaMonkey has just released 1.0 Beta. I personally prefer the old approach as well, but have decided for the moment to not switch back from Firefox/Thunderbird simply because I have now become quite used to these applications and have begun to rely on some of the superb extensions created by the community for them.

QEMU 0.8.0 is out (as is VMWare Player 1.0). By the way, QEMU can be easily used to create virtual machine discs for use with VMWare Player. However, I still prefer to use QEMU.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Miscellany

QEMU 0.7.0 is available now.


"Fortress" (PDF) is a new language from Sun. (Yes, courtesy LtU once more.)


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Miscellany

Paul Brook has created a Free replacement for kqemu called qvm86. Both are Linux kernel modules that enable QEMU to run guest operating systems at near-native speeds. kqemu is unfortunately closed-source though it is free of cost for non-commercial use.

SRM-238 was only slightly less worse than SRM-236. Muddled thinking ("coder's block"?) once again ensured that I could solve only one of the problems in the given time. I really suck as a coder. I should also stop writing about SRMs.

Mark Wielaard has written a nice article on GCJ in LWN.net. I did not completely grok Nathan Myers's (ncm) problems with the design of the Java language as written in the comments section for that article. Ditto for Jamie Zawinski's problems with Java for that matter. I have a long way to go before I can even begin to understand some of the objections people have for the design of programming language.


It sucks big time that gtkhtml requires the whole GNOME schmear. Unwieldy dependencies seem to be the general rule in Gtk/GNOME-land. Time to learn Qt.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Trouble in QEMU Land

QEMU is a superb (fast and reasonably accurate) emulator for x86 and other architectures and a viable alternative to VMWare. Fabrice Bellard, the extremely talented author of the program, has now written the
QEMU Accelerator Module which apparently drastically improves x86-on-x86 performance. Unfortunately, this is provided as a binary-only module and under a proprietary (non-Free) license. He says he would open up the sources only if some company sponsors the effort or he is somehow compensated for the loss in revenue. This has led to flames, "understanding" posts, etc. on the QEMU mailing list.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

QEMU Rocks!

At work, we needed to test out our project on as many machines as possible, but we could not get access to enough machines that we could maul as and when we pleased. VMWare would have helped, but we didn't have enough licenses. Bochs was good but was too slow for practical purposes. Fortunately for us, we found QEMU and it fit the bill quite well. It has been written primarily by Fabrice Bellard and is quite fast and works surprisingly well - we could get an entire installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Advanced Server running under QEMU without any problems!

For the adventurous, quite a few QEMU-ready images can be found at FreeOSZoo. QEMU also comes with a utility to convert VMWare disc images to the raw disc images used by both QEMU and Bochs. Very cool stuff and highly recommended! Thanks Fabrice!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)