On 6/8/21 5:12 pm, Andrzej Peszynski wrote:
>
>
> On 06.08.2021 06:25, Brad Campbell via Dng wrote:
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>> Why do you even need/want libvirt? I have several machines which run qemu guests just using simple bash scripts to bring them up (and all the bash script is there for is to hold the command line parameters). I like libvirt and virt-manager for configuring and customising the guests, but at the end of the day all that is is a fancy front end to qemu.
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> <snip>
>> If you are stripping the guts out of libvirt, why use it in the first place?
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> Brad, thanks a million! Learning is fun especially for a "apt install" man as I am.
> I am looking now at how I can simplify all this (may be stripping parts of QEMU too?), to keep running, and handle my configurations and resources binding.
> In the end, all what I need is executing in isolated ring the ELF of dozen of (not trusted) proxies, servers and libraries + resources balancing + isolated filesystems + sockets.
>
> From the other side, I think that the Type 1 hypervisor for desktop is also interesting thing, It's very tempting to have windowed multimachine with realtime switch capability.

I mostly do that and have done for over 20 years now.
My desktop is essentially a moderately powered thin client (currently a 2011 iMac27 with 2 27" thunderbolt displays running Beowulf).
On the server side :
- A Dual head windows 8 VM for Autodesk products & MS Office.
- A Dual head windows 10 VM for newer Autodesk products that won't run on Windows 8.
- A Debian wheezy / xfce VM for a specific older version of Openoffice.
- A Windows 8 VM with a CCTV server.
- A Devuan Ascii / XFCE VM for Peer to peer.
- A Devuan Ascii headless VM for Cacti, HLI to the HVAC system and some general development and plumbing
- Numerous VMs with specific build configurations for embedded software.

The other thing VMs are good for is tying up Scam call-center workers. "My windows is full of viruses you say? And you can help me with that? Brilliant, just let me sit down and start my computer up" (spins up a fresh clean windows VM I prepared earlier)

Win4lin, bochs and sheepshaver were brilliant, then qemu came and conquered.
I can't imagine ever running Windows on the bare metal again.

Between spice and rdp, there's not much you can't do.

Brad