I decided to try out the new kvm hypervisor. It is built into the linux 2.6.20 kernel, and is far simpler to run and setup than xen. In fact, it is quite nice: if you know how to run qemu, you know how to run kvm: they have modified qemu so that you use the same command line, tools, etc. If kvm is not present, qemu runs as always; if kvm is present, the modified qemu starts up kvm with the target system as a guest.
First problem I hit with kvm was an emulation problem, so you do need to modify your plan9.ini to set *norealmode=1 The far jump in again16bit causes kvm to crash and burn (look for the "EA", etc. at the end of again16bit). Well, never mind that, the numbers will show it does not (yet) really matter. The test system here is a Thinkpad T60 with Core Duo (NOT Core 2). 1 GB memory. It's fast. The plan 9 systems I booted were, for qemu and kvm, a terminal; and for xen, a cpu server. I.e. the xen Plan 9 system is doing a bit more work, as it starts up more servers, but does not start up rio. boot: qemu, 60 seconds kvm, 100 seconds (yes, indeed, kvm did indeed boot more slowly than plain old qemu) xen, 6 seconds (it's nice) build a pccpuf kernel: qemu, 100 seconds kvm, 80 seconds xen, 12 seconds So, the choice for speed is still xen. THX will remain xen-based for now. thanks ron
