What is Digg?46 Comments
- pygi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+24Great, really great. Altought we do have a lot of open virtualization options right now, kqemu has been with us for some time now, and releasing it under GPL was IMHO the right choice. Let's see where this takes us in the future.
- rbanffy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+22@BrainInAJar,
Not just Linux. Any other GPL'd program can.
You can't, however, use it in BSD-licensed software because anyone (MS, EMC etc) can grab it and close it again, like MS once did with the TCP stack.
BSD is the right choice if you want to give your software away. GPL is the right choice if you want to keep your software free. - mraustin1337, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15This might be one of the best things that has happened to Open Source Virtualization in a while.
- schestowitz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15The project is under a lot of pressure because too many altenratives are going open-source (at least 2 I can think of did this in the past month). Of course, there's now KVM as well and it's in the latest stable kernel.
- rbanffy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13@BrainInAJar,
That's incorrect. There are tons of GPL software running on OSX. Bash, the default terminal shell for OSX, is GPL. You can't link it into the OSX kernel, but that's completely another story.
Stop spreading misconceptions. - ricksite, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12From what I understand, KQEMU is used to execute x86 native code directly on the processor instead of through emulation. Thus, it won't work on PowerPC. It might work on new Intel Mac though. I am not an expert, please correct me if I am wrong.
- geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10This is great, kqemu is blazingly fast, almost native speed.
- kkubasik, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9I think that it was virtualbox and kvm that put the pressure on for this to happen, but kvm is an entirely different solution from a .
- webNV, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Today I read an article on FreeSoftwareMagazine.com regarding MINIX 3, which gave steps to run MINIX 3 in QEMU. It was mentioned there that the QEMU Accelerator component is not free, only to find a couple of hours later this article.
- shakin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@BrainInAJar
Perhaps you're just ignorant about what linking is.
When a programmer decides to use GPLed code in his own program, then he has expressly made the decision to GPL his program as well.
You can certainly write a program, use the GPL license, then use that program anywhere and in any capacity. Running a GPL program on OS X wouldn't force Apple to relicense their kernel. They'd have to purposefully make the decision to change their kernel license if they wanted to integrate GPL code. Even if some rogue Apple programmer placed GPL code into Apple's kernel and Apple was caught with it, the OS X kernel wouldn't have to be relicensed as GPL. Apple would just have to remove the offending code just like with any other copyright violation.
The GPL only directly affects programmers who want to use other peoples' code in their programs. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Completely unrelated, but serving a similar purpose. Kqemu just allows code that is on the same platform to run directly on the processor instead of having to go through a code translation layer (which is silly, translating x86 code to x86 code, for example). KVM allows the kernel to be the host to a whole virtual OS through the VT extensions to modern processors.
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I think it was likely code stagnation: Open Source projects (the ones that are actually used by people) get a lot more attention than closed source code, thusly they can be optimized and bug-fixed faster. Kqemu is still a fairly buggy module, and could use some serious work. It makes sense to open source it.
- daedius, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Can anyone tell me how this relates to the KVM project? I understand that KVM uses Qemu in some manner or another, will KQemu affect KVM in any way? Or is KQemu completely unrelated?
- daedius, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3another great benchmark of Qemu, KQemu, KVM, and native
http://linux.inet.hr/finally-user-friendly-virtualization-for-linux.html - gsnedders, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4No, virtualisation is perfectly possible on PPC (however, there are very few implementations short of IBM's high end offerings). The virtualised environment on PPC would be PPC, like it is x86 on x86. PPC had hardware support for virtualisation before x86.
- nailer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Full instructions for running Windows XP inside Ubuntu, including seamless virtualization (what Parallels calls Coherance).
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsXPUnderQemuHowTo - drag, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I wouldn't call KVM 'stable' just yet. For instance I can't use the -std-vga VESA bocsh driver in it, which is something normally you can use in Qemu. (what this does is have a much faster VGA emulation, so screen refresh times are much faster and cpu overhead is much less)
It crashes on my machine. I filed a bug report on their sourceforge website (actually added a couple comments), but I guess it's something that they haven't noticed or it is something that is dependant on some other part of the code they haven't fixed yet.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1629495&group_id=180599&atid=893831
But it's pretty decent. I wouldn't want to be very dependent on it just yet, though.
The major downside to KVM is that you require fairly special hardware.. Pentium-D + supporting motherboard, Most (not all) CoreDuo2 cpus (some thinkpads have it disabled, for instance), or newer Xeon stuff. For AMD you require a AM2 socket proccessor and motherboard to use KVM.
With Kqemu you can run it on any x86 machine. So it's more usefull to a lot of people. Not as fast though. - greyfade, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5@BrainInAJar: no, GPL means it can be modified and ported with complete abandon. you could theoretically develop a ring-0 BSD port (though i'm not clear if the GPL allows modules to link with BSD kernels - i know the LGPL does) or even a Windows driver module based on this source. this is also an excellent first step toward getting this included in the standard Linux kernel.
@rbanffy: i don't think you understand the significance of the differences in the BSD license and GPL. the GPL imposes a set of restrictions: source can be modified, but source changes must be distributed with binaries. no additional restrictions are allowed. the BSD license imposes an advertising restriction which is incompatible with the GPL and doesn't mandate redistribution of modified source.
(i should clarify: redistribution of source is required only if a release is made based on modified source.) - Hitchhiker90, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This is awesome. While I never used QEMU under linux I have used it under Windows quite a bit with the KQEMU Accelerator for running live linux iso's. Free or not the accelerator worked very nicely and was easy to install. QEMU is always going to have a place in my as well as a lot of others computers. I think its one of the few programs that will actually create a blank harddisk image to install the OS onto. At least a lot of other how-to's always reference it to do that task.
- Wyzard, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4@BrainInAJar:
"now that it's GPL, it'll never happen."
Of course, NOW that' it's GPL, unlike when it was closed-source with a restrictive license...
It's so horribly restricting when something is made more free than it was before...
Big deal, it can't be included in OSX today just like it couldn't yesterday. - daedius, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Here are some statistics of Qemu running with KQemu enabled. To at least give some perspective to the performance. I'm not sure how accurate this is with the bleeding edge of the release today, but interesting nonetheless. http://www.calcmaster.net/qemu/benchmarks-20061216/
- LocalH, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@Wootery:
BSD doesn't include the advertising clause anymore. - Wootery, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@LocalH
Right you are, my mistake. - rbanffy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@gsnedders,
IIRC, there was, once, a PPC that had hardware support for x86 emulation.
No PPC after that kept such traits. - jellygraph, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1sweet!
- bigtomrodney, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1From the QEMU site -
"QEMU version 0.8.0 is out (Changelog).
* Support for ARM Integrator/CP board system emulation.
* Support for MIPS R4K system emulation.
* Initial SMP support on x86 (up to 255 CPUs !).
* Many new audio emulation features.
* Initial USB support.
* New networking options for VLAN support between several QEMU instances. "
And that's just this release. It already has support for many platforms, it's just cleaner for x86 -> x86 as there isn't a need for as much emulation of the CPU - ubuwalker31, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3@BrainInAJar
Wow, you have absolutely no idea what your talking about. Your are a troll. Or more precisely, the wrong answer to the whole "brain in a vat" thought experiment. The thought experiment basically concludes that since you cannot know whether you are a brain in a vat, that you cannot know whether most of your beliefs might be completely false.
Of course, this is utter nonsense, as Descarte solved with his simple "I think, therefore I am". And your pontifications on the GPL are just that. Nonsense and FUD. Or the delusional ramblings of a paid shill for Microsoft, trying to invent a new reality, for all those other brains in a vat on the internet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat - anonydigg, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5now only if someone ported it to run on intel OS X!
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"PPC615"
I thought that was just a research project, like those guys at Intel who were building processors that had re-flashable microprograms and could run both PPC and x86 code side-by-side. The reason these chips were never released was because the performance is so pathetic; PPC simply doesn't have the same hardware profile as x86, and it's a fair bit easier to run PPC code on x86 than visa versa.
Then we can talk about Transmeta and their Code Morphing processors, but that's a story for another day. - gsnedders, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@rbanffy:
The PPC615? No, that supported x86 in hardware. No emulation. - pravi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@xmilky
(For your personal use, you may always "break" the licenses.)
You don't have to break the license, GPL allows any kind of use including linking with a proprietary program (of course as long as you don't distribute it) - gsnedders, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1It wasn't a research chip – it was a project by IBM that was scraped (and not due to performance, it was compatible in speed, in x86 mode, to the Pentiums of the time) due to the fact that the OS had to run in PPC32/PPC64 mode, and that MS didn't want to port their consumer (DOS) version of Windows to PPC.
- Wootery, on 10/12/2007, -6/+6"BSD is the right choice if you want to give your software away."
Don't forget the obnoxious advertising clause!
For true copycenter, go for a modified BSD licence. - xmilky, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@BrainInAJar:
You're right that the new GNU GPL won't permit Apple to include KQEMU with OSX. But like others already pointed out, this makes little difference to its proprietarity from last week.
If Apple however wanted to, they could still negotiate with the author and get a different license (for cash). Also, there is still no reason for not porting KQEMU to OSX or its kernel. The GNU GPL might forbid "linking", but does only seriously bite when it comes to distributing it. (For your personal use, you may always "break" the licenses.)
If Apple employees made an OSX port of the qemu module and made it available for download (somewhere else), this would be perfectly legit.
I'm not so sure on Darwins license - APL would make it a little more difficult (one of the many licenses the GPL is incompatible to), but if it's just BSDL, the KQEMU module could even be included and distributed within. Apple had to adopt the GNU GPL only "pro-forma" then. It suffices to include the GNU LICENSE file in the tarball, the other 98% of the Darwin kernel would retain their license preamble anyhow. The Linux kernel for example contains a few snippets and files which just contain the BSD license statement. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0How is 'linking' defined anyway, isn't it only when you take parts of the code(in source or binary form) from another program. In the case of kernel modules I assume its got to do with needing to include headers. Would it be possible to clean room engineer an alternative set of kernel headers that are just the basic APIs without needing kernel code, or use a layer system, like FUSE with ZFS or nVidia with their drivers.
Also I would assume its legal to write code that links in with the kernel under a different nonGPL license but just not distribute compiled binaries of the code. Could find home users end up compiling things like there own ZFS drivers etc... And for newbie friendly distros, there could be a box asking if you want to do it and saying its illegal to do so and violates the GPL similar to the way Ubuntu is going to incorporate 3d accelerated drivers (although I don't think actually running the nVidia drivers are illegal?) - itsonlyme, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I hope this means someone will be able to port it to PowerPC for those of us with last year's Apple hardware...
- Muncher, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1@BrainInAJar
I only block people for blatant spamming or incredible ignorance. You're guilty of the latter. - drag, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0@BrainInAJar
Ya.. That is why GPL sucks, because I want a ***** of semi-incompatable and confusing licenses stuffed into one operating system kernel. (that's sarcasm, folks)
And if you don't think that isn't a problem with the MPL/CDDL/Apache/BSD licenses then you never bothered to actually look at them and understand what they are saying. - BrainInAJar, on 10/12/2007, -7/+5"GPL is the right choice if you want to keep your software free."
No, GPL is the right choice when you want to make other people's software free, which is exactly what Stallman wants.
If you're worried about protecting your own code from being stolen, the apache license (and mit, cddl, apsl, mozilla) protects your code from pilfering (all changes to the file need to be shared, if you take a function from one file & put it in to another, that new file is under the same license) without forcing people who just want to link against your objects to use the exact same license.
That's why freebsd can take zfs & dtrace from solaris... because so long as they continue to share those files under the CDDL (opensolaris' license), the rest of the project can be BSD. If the files migrate, so does the license (like gpl), but if someone wants the (bsd licensed) tcp/ip stack, they aren't forced to use the license from a completely unrelated part of the system (the dtrace part) - BrainInAJar, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2@shakin
yes, i'm aware of what linking is. Your rebuttal more or less /is/ my point... it can't be included with OSX because it's gpl, and apple doesn't want to GPL all of the osx kernel - BrainInAJar, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2Curious how the only reply you have is an argument ad hominem.
I'm neither ignorant, nor a paid shill for MS ( I haven't used windows in about 8 years. It's a crap OS and I want nothing to do with it ).
What I am, however, is aware of the restrictions the GPL places your code under. You are expressly forbidden from linking to code which isn't compatible with GPL (that means gpl, lgpl, and bsd). I support the mozilla/apache license for the very reason that I love free software. Freedom.
You shouldn't be forced to GPL an entire project just because one small part of it is GPL. - tkjacobsen, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1Have you looked at the date at qemu's homepage, it sais 5. february.. Maybe that's why the other article is wrong
- zeiche, on 10/12/2007, -4/+0There won't be a PowerPC version of KQEMU because this is a x86 virtualiser for x86 operating systems. PPC won't run x86 natively no matter how much you want it to.
- BrainInAJar, on 10/12/2007, -9/+2kqemu is a kernel module, you can't link it to the kernel...
that's what a port would entail... linking... something expressly forbidden by the GPL
yes, gpl software can run on a non gpl kernel and vice versa... that's not what we're talking about, we're talking about linking... and in that regard, GPL *IS* viral
it's only misinformation when it's false, which it is not... - BrainInAJar, on 10/12/2007, -16/+2now that it's GPL, it'll never happen.
GPL code would force the rest of OSX (well, the kernel anyways, since that would be direct linking) to be GPL, and apple isn't prepared to do that. Apple chose an Apache derived license for a reason... all the protections of GPL on a per file (rather than perproject) basis
the kqemu crew has now closed the door to having kqemu on OSX, rather than opened it - BrainInAJar, on 10/12/2007, -33/+3ugh, GPL means nobody but linux can use it.. lame
why couldn't they just BSD it? or MPL/MIT/Xorg/CDDL it... those licenses don't pollute the rest of the project
Browsing Digg on your phone just got easier with our enhancements to the 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is