[Qemu-devel] Open source qemu x86 accelerator module.

[Paul Brook]

I'd like to announce qvm86; an open source x86 accelerator module for qemu. 

qvm86 is basically a drop-in replacement for kqemu. However is is an 
independent replacement written from scratch by myself, and released under 
the GnNU General Public Licence (GPL).

The CVS repository and mailing list for qvm86 are hosted on savannah:
http://www.nongnu.org/qvm86/

qvm86 is still in the early stages of development, so I provide no guarantees 
about its reliability. It almost certainly has bugs which could crash your 
machine or cause data corruption. Any assistance identifying and fixing these 
bugs is welcomed ;-)

See the README file in qvm86 CVS for brief instructions how to install. It's 
basically the same procedure as kqemu.

qvm86 currently only works on x86-linux hosts, and has only been tested on 
relatively recent 2.6 kernels with udev installed.

It should be possible to port qvm86 to other x86 hosts (eg. FreeBSD or even 
Windows). I don't have immediate plans for doing such ports, but would 
welcome patches if other people want to do the porting. It may also be 
possible to x86-64 hosts, but I don't know enough details to say how hard 
this would be.

I have successfully booted windows 2000, freebsd and couple of different linux 
guests. Windows 98 guests don't work, but I think I know what's wrong.

Performance depends heavily on the guest wokload. It varies from near-native 
to about the same as normal qemu. For example compiling qemu with gcc is ~5x 
slower than native (normal qemu is ~17x slower). I believe there is sill 
quite a bit of scope for improving performance.

Paul Brook