Hi,
In their paper [1], the authors mention that they were able to run 32-bit versions of Windows XP and 7, among other guest OSes, in KVM-L4 on AMD x86 processors with AMD-V extensions.
Does anyone from the list happen to have an .iso around which boots on such an AMD machine and demonstrates the performance of Windows (any version will do) running in KVM-L4? Alternatively, I would be grateful for any recipe how to adapt a demo CD or Fisco.OC/L4Re build environment so that it allows to start a Windows image in QEMU/KVM on L4.
So far, I have managed to install and to run Windows 7 Pro in a QEMU/KVM image on my Linux host. As this image is over 4 GByte by itself, plus QEMU with its dependencies, there is no way of just extending the ramdisk image in order to load and run it in L4Linux.
After searching this list, I so far found two possible ways to proceed:
a) Extended the ramdisk so that it mounts a disk partition /dev/hdaX, and then chroot to that mounted partition. Then try to launch the QEMU image from that new root. However, a previous poster here ran into a problem while trying this, and it is unclear to me if was able to overcome it [2].
b) Abandon the ramdisk and have L4Linux mount a disk partition as its root file system directly upon boot. This was tried in 2006 and it is unclear if it finally worked [3].
In both cases, I presume that the binaries in that partition (QEMU and its dependencies) must match the version of the L4Linux kernel (which is 3.0). My Linux build environment uses Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (which uses kernel 2.6.x).
My only interest at this early stage of a quick Proof of Concept is just to get a feeling if a faithfully virtualised Windows run on top of KVM-L4 still performs reasonably well on a recent (Business-) PC, so that it is still acceptable to the average user.
Previous results published suggested that real-world Linux applications incur (only) a 4..5% overhead when run on top of L4Linux, compared to running them natively on (bare metal) Linux. Now I would like to know if this surprisingly low overhead also continues throughout KVM-L4 with Windows as one of its "applications".
Thanks in advance for any hints, Rolf
[1] Virtual Machines Jailed - Virtualization in Systems with Small Trusted Computing Bases Michael Peter, Henning Schild, Adam Lackorzynski, Alexander Warg VTDS'09: Workshop on Virtualization Technology for Dependable Systems (Eurosys 2009 affiliated workshop) , March 2009 http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/papers_ps/peterschild09_vtds_virtual_machines_ja...
[2] Using hard disk as root filesystem http://www.mail-archive.com/l4-hackers@os.inf.tu-dresden.de/msg00851.html
[3] Booting L4Linux/Fiasco with root=/dev/hda http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/pipermail/l4-hackers/2006/002396.html