Played with qemu lately. It's slower than VMWare but my machine is more responsive and I can still use it while I have a virtual system booting so it's a first good point for qemu.
The network setup is quite powerfull as you can do everything "by hand". I wrote a small script that I use to have all my virtual machines bridged (to test network installs) on a private network and still be able to mount real nfs shares or download things from the Internet.
Currently for my usage there are only 3 limitations in qemu : the network is slow, the network card does not handle PXE, the cdrom drive has to be hdc.
Many thanks for this great work !
Today, DLFP was down for maintainance and a move to a new hosting, so I read slashdot and met a news about QEMU Accelerator Module. This kernel module allows near native performance in qemu. A friend of mine tested it to install Windows XP. I only tested booting a Mandrakelinux image I already had : the boot time decreased from 2 min 40 to 1 minute !
That's very nice and I hope the author will soon get sponsors and free it !
2005 Edition of FOSDEM is next Week-End. This year I won't handle a booth so I hope I'll see more of the so interesting conferences !
I went to see this movie (only available in French currently I think) yesterday. Pictures are really beautiful, the music is nice, the only thing I didn't like was the voices speaking. A nice thing I read somewhere on the internet is that on the DVD we'll be able to deactivate the voices :)
I think I had never seen a movie with so few people in the room (the photo does not show the 2 friends of mine at my side).
Today I opened my first ticket on CPAN bug tracker. I hope my perl skills are not worst than I thought. OK, the patch changes only one line, but I think it's usefull anyway :-)
One of the limitations I had problems with in QEMU was the CD-ROM having to be secondary master.
I looked into it tonight and found that the limitation was in the options handling and not in the emulation code. So I wrote a small and far from perfect patch to allow any IDE device to be a CD-ROM (so that we can even get serveral CD-ROM drives).
I can now have for example primary slave and secondary slave to be CD-ROM drives with only a media in the secondary slave by running :
qemu -hda hda.img -hdc hdc.img -hdd my_other.iso -hdbtype 1 -hddtype 1.
This was a nice (but cold) Week-End full of interesting people. In fact there was so much interesting people I could not spend time with most of the people I planned to see :(
This year there were less conference room but much more developper's room which also hosted conferences, so a lot of very interesting conferences. I had a few problems this time, like my VISA card that got eaten by the cash machine on Saturday evening but I'll be back you next year for my 5th FOSDEM !
Meanwhile you can see my (quite poor quality) pictures. I also have a video to prove that the time is going really faster when you use Perl.
lrz [I think you are walking to the dark side :) ]