Re: [Qemu-devel] HAXM is now open source

[Kamil Rytarowski]

On 17.11.2017 11:30, Yu Ning wrote:
> 
> 
> On 11/17/2017 16:53, Kamil Rytarowski wrote:
>> On 14.11.2017 09:54, Yu Ning wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> As some of you may have noticed, since QEMU 2.9.0, an accelerator known
>>> as “hax” has been available for Windows and macOS builds of QEMU, thanks
>>> to the hard work of Vincent Palatin and help from this community (Paolo
>>> Bonzini, Stefan Weil, et al.).
>>>
>>> The accelerator requires a host kernel module (driver) known as Intel
>>> Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM), i.e. intelhaxm.sys on
>>> Windows or intelhaxm.kext on macOS, similar to how the KVM accelerator
>>> depends on kvm.ko on Linux.
>>>
>>> Today, we released the source code of the HAXM kernel module under the
>>> BSD 3-clause license:
>>>
>>> https://github.com/intel/haxm
>>>
>>> We look forward to working with the community to improve HAXM (both the
>>> kernel module and the accelerator). The code is accompanied by some
>>> basic documentation (README.md and API.md), which is incomplete, but
>>> hopefully helps people get started. If you have any questions or
>>> suggestions, please create an issue or post a comment on GitHub.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Yu
>>>
>> Please make it clear whether this module can be ported (as host) to
>> other OSes
> 
> It was designed with only Windows and Mac hosts in mind, and we don't
> plan to support more host OSes. But porting HAXM to another host OS is
> possible.  If you take a look at the HAXM source tree, there are pretty
> clear boundaries between host-independent code (core/, include/*.h),
> Windows-specific code (windows/, include/windows/) and Mac-specific code
> (darwin/, include/darwin/).

Sounds good. I will give it a try.

>>   and whether it can support arbitrary guests OSes (for the
>> same CPU).
> 
> Unfortunately not, but again it can be done.  Initially HAXM was
> designed to support only two guest OSes, namely Android and Tizen. When
> we upstreamed the HAXM accelerator module to QEMU, we verified it using
> various desktop OS images, mostly Linux-based (Chrome OS, Debian,
> Ubuntu, CentOS, etc.), although there were a few others (FreeDOS, etc.).
> 
> Nevertheless, you may run into issues when you boot a completely
> different guest OS (e.g. Windows, which we have never tested), or even
> with one that is similar to what I've mentioned (e.g. Fedora, which IIRC
> will boot to a kernel panic).  In such cases, the culprit is usually
> bug(s) in the HAXM kernel module, causing incorrect behavior when the
> guest executes certain x86 instructions.  Once all the bugs exposed by a
> specific guest OS are fixed, that guest OS will work correctly.
> 

If it will run BSD for start it will be good enough for now.

Thank you for the answers!

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