Xen? (was Re: [wellylug] Mailing List & Webserver)

[Pete Black]

More on Qemu - I used it a bit when i needed to build some servers in  
an environment where VMWare server was used, as qemu images can be  
converted to VMWare images with a single command.- I also used it to  
do some KNOPPIX customisation.

I would never use qemu without the kqemu accelerator - Running X- 
Windows in a non-accelerated qemu environment is agonisingly slow.  
However, console-only stuff or non-performance intensive apps as Ewan  
mentions would probably work fine.

QEmu + VMWare Player pretty much gives you a fully functional VMWare  
for free, which is a big saving on paying for the full VMWare  
workstation product. VMWare definitely has better performance than  
qemu, but with kqemu, its quite usuable.

-Pete


> QEmu works surprisingly well if you can throw enough CPU at it.  It's
> quite handy for testing operating systems which haven't been ported to
> anything else.  The full CPU emulation is obviously rather  
> inefficient,
> but aside from that most things work as in an ordinary PC.  It also
> appears not to suffer from disk IO issues (unlike UML) from what I can
> see.  There's a binary-only (gratis) CPU emulation module which
> apparently makes things run a lot faster, but I've not tried that and
> thus far haven't felt a great need.  It's amazing what throwing 1.8GHz
> of CPU power at a problem and only needing 200MHz of emulated power  
> will do.
> QEmu is quite handy as a VMWare replacement, for testing things which
> run on "a PC" and haven't been ported to anything else.  I also use it
> for build environments for non-Linux OS.