Re: [gentoo-user] A helping hand with virtual machines, please.

[Felix Kuperjans]

Am 22.11.2011 23:12, schrieb Alan Mackenzie:
> Good evening, Felix!
Good evening, Alan!
>
> On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 09:14:15PM +0100, Felix Kuperjans wrote:
>> Hi Alan,
>> Am 22.11.2011 20:20, schrieb Alan Mackenzie:
>>> Hi, Gentoo.
>>> A friend of mine recently suggested I should install and play with
>>> virtual machines on my Gentoo.
>>> I've scanned /usr/portage for likely looking packages, particularly in
>>> directory "virtual", yet found nothing likely looking.
>> Virtual machines are all in /usr/portage/app-emulation, not in virtual
>> (that is for virtual packages).
>>> Would somebody please give me some hints which packages I should be
>>> looking at, and perhaps any use flags I might need.
>> VirtualBox is quite easy for beginners, but requires external kernel
>> modules and requires a GUI (what you most probably want anyway).
>> KVM (maybe with virt-manager as a GUI) is quite powerful for desktop
>> virtualization, but requires processor support (but it is available on
>> all recent (Core2 oder newer) non-Atom CPUs by Intel and AFAIK all
>> recent AMD CPUs) and the kernel modules (but they are real upstream
>> modules and very stable).
> I'm kind of leaning towards KVM at the moment.  Just a quick question:
> by "kernel modules" do you literally mean kernel modules?  It's just that
> my kernel isn't built for modules (for simplicity's sake), so would that
> mean me having to change this, or can I just build the stuff in?
It can be built in as well. The necessary options are:
Virtualization -> Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) support

and then the corresponding processor support, i.e.:
KVM for Intel processors support
or
KVM for AMD processors support

That should be usually sufficient, the "Host kernel accelerator for
virtio net" can speed up your network but is not necessary.
>> Xen is the most advanced solution, but maybe not the best one to play
>> around. But it's supported by virt-manager, too.
>>> TVM