Is QEMU working/reliable under ....

[Daniel Corbe]

Roland Smith <rsmith at xs4all.nl> writes:

> On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 11:08:58AM -0600, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> .... FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE-p5, qemu-0.11.1_18, kqemu-kmod-1.3.0.p11_12 ? I 
>> have tried w/ kqemu loaded & unloaded (recommended online), w/ 
>> -nographic, w/ -vga std, etc. No love. All I want to do is run a WinXP 
>> 32bit VM &/or a 64-bit Win7 VM from my desktop (xfce-4.10_7, xorg-7.7_1, 
>> xf86-video-vesa-2.3.3_5) :-/ .... Several online sites imply that it 
>> works OK, 1 specifically w/ FreeBSD 9 no less. Any clues appreciated, 
>> any more info gladly provided ....
>
> This version is *ancient*. I would suggest trying qemu-devel instead, because
> that provides qemu-2.2.0. Last time I tried it 0.11 with or without qkemu
> crashed a lot.
>
> According to the website, qemu version 0.11 and up do not support kqemu
> anymore (see http://wiki.qemu.org/KQEMU), so you don't need that
> anymore.

This brings up an interesting question.   Is kqemu-kmod and kqemu's
idead of "kqemu" the same thing?  If so, good luck to anyone trying to
virtualize production loads with qemu on FreeBSD.

Are there alternatives?  KVM's documentation on the subject seems dated:

http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/BSD

But I'm not entirely convinces kqemu-kmod == kqemu if KVM is even
bothering to mention it.

>
> In time (and if your processor is new enough to have “extended page tables”) I
> guess qemu on FreeBSD could be replaced by the bhyve hypervisor that is now in
> 10.x and is being developed further in HEAD. Currently bhyve can load FreeBSD,
> OpenBSD, NetBSD and Linux guests. Support to run windoze as a guest will come
> in the future.
>

I'm patiently waiting for bhyve to get VGA BIOS support so I can run
Windows guests.  In a perfect world maybe.

-Daniel