Qemu virtual machine

I'm planning to create a qemu virtual machine on my NetBSD laptop, so I can set-up a minimal Void glibc running Firefox and watch Netflix on BSD.
I'm wondering though, which one is best...
HAXM or NVMM ? Any thoughts?

Jay

pin I don't know how it will work .. But Netflix on BSD won't be better experience..

JuvenalUrbino

pin I'm wondering though, which one is best...
HAXM or NVMM ? Any thoughts?

QEMU with HAXM acceleration is currently the only one providing graphical session support ?

Jay ? thx! I'm aware it won't be a better experience... or, maybe it will be after all, ...just due to the fact that, its on BSD ?

Jay

JuvenalUrbino I thought NVMM also had graphical Support..

Jay yeap, So did I! At least the Fedora and Windows 10 screenshots on the web page look rather graphical.
I've built qemu-haxm on Sunday. The build was ok, but the package failed to install...
Can't remember the error, though. I was thinking of trying nvmm when I have time.

EDIT: Damn it!
Just saw this post ... ? ...I've built the qemu-haxm wip package, that is no longer maintained. No wonder it didn't install... ?
I did wonder, why the hell is it building qemu version 3.0 ...
Oh well, maybe I'll do it right next time ?
Whenever that may be!!

JuvenalUrbino

Wow, crazy! it seems nvmm has improved quite a lot in the last 2 months (had a look at commits history as well) it's now officially marked as 'usabke', whatever it means.

Given the abysmal HAXM support for AMD, NVMM should be the goto for AMD CPUs, as farcas I can guess. I'm extremely interested in feedback on nvmm vs haxm, as st the moment I'm too busy to dedidicate time to such a task. what's sure is that, for the moment, the amount of walkthroughs available on QEMU usage is greater by several orders of magnitude; @pin thanks a lot for reporting

Had a short amount of time today. Should say, not enough ?
haxm module is only available in pkgsrc current and nvmm is only available in current /src/sys and /src/lib

Either, I wait for NetBSD-9.0 or, I take the risk and install one package, or sources from current on my stable system. Another alternative, is to build haxm from source.

Ok guys,... experiment failed ?
I fetched pkgsrc-2018Q4, made the wip/ directory, cloned git-wip inside and fetched the sources for the STABLE branch into usr/src

Then I fetched sys.tar.gz lib.tar.gz and tests.tar.gz from CURRENT and moved the nvmm stuff into place inside the STABLE src/ directories
Yes, yes, I know I shouldn't do this, but it was just an experiment ?

Build libnvmm fails, though ?
It makes sense that it fails, but it was worth a try ?

...
System cleaned. All good ?

Jay

pin also check this http://polprog.net/blog/netbsd-hax/

Jay cheers Jay, I'm aware of it ?
haxm modules are available in CURRENT and qemu-haxm has moved from WIP to CURRENT,
Its ok to build a few packages from source, but I think I'll wait for NetBSD-9.0... unfortunately, I don't have the time or patience to build everything from source. If I did, I would be running CURRENT.
This is not a must anyway, its just for fun ?
I still can watch Netflix on Linux.

JuvenalUrbino

pin I guess the patches applied by Kamil R. in order to compile HAXM kernel driver support on kNetBSD-current do not build on 8.0 as the latter lacks some shared object, module, or what else ?

JuvenalUrbino maybe I should take CURRENT for a spin sometime ?

? Coming soon to NetBSD stable ?
nvmm ?

JuvenalUrbino

pin has it been moved to 8.1 release schedule? ?

PS: I can't stand HEAD branches because I 'm committed to stability too much ? If you remember I regarded even Void Linux as too unstable to meet for my preferece. I'm the kind of person who's perfectly fine running old software (Slackware, even Solaris 10), as long as it works and it receives security patches.

NetBSD-current isn't bad (stayed on it for a year before 8.0, as 7.x lacked just to many features available upstream), but it can result hostile for a casual user not involved in the project development, especially without a solid background CS knowledge

JuvenalUrbino as far as I understood, it will be in 9.0
Do read the blog post, though...

"...the complex emulation machinery is not in the kernel, but in userland. This is an excellent security property of NVMM, because it reduces the risk for the host in case of bug or vulnerability – the host kernel remains unaffected –, and also has the advantage of making the machinery easily fuzzable. Currently, this property is not found in other hypervisors such as KVM, HAXM or Bhyve, and I hope we'll be able to preserve it as we move forward with more backends." ?

JuvenalUrbino I can't stand HEAD branches because I 'm committed to stability too much ? If you remember I regarded even Void Linux as too unstable to meet for my preferece. I'm the kind of person who's perfectly fine running old software (Slackware, even Solaris 10), as long as it works and it receives security patches.

Well, well... I'm somewhere in between ?
But, IF nvmm works as I expect it to do. And, hopefully I can have enough patience and wait for the 9.0 release...
I'll tear apart one of my machines for spare parts and keep just two systems running. Void musl-libC build and NetBSD with nvmm. I can't figure out needing a third system anymore.
You see, I'm currently getting tired of supporting 5 systems ? at home.

JuvenalUrbino

pin nvmm is hybrid hypervisor completely designed as a userspace solution? outstanding, can't even start imagine (nor think I'd get if got it explsined XD) how this was accomplished by M.Villard

I wonder how hardware abstraction ia carried out without involving some kernel module, that's really interesting!

Jay

btw message from <ryoshu> from IRC "HAXM works on 8.0 without patching the kernel anymore"

Jay thx ?

Jay

JuvenalUrbino from ryoshu from IRC : please tell urbino that NVMM does use kernel module for hw access.. however part of functionality is used a userspace library that is distinguish property of NVMM