Re: [Qemu-discuss] KVM on Mac OS X host

[Alexander Graf]

> Am 21.08.2015 um 12:08 schrieb Programmingkid <address@hidden>:
> 
> 
>> On Aug 21, 2015, at 2:57 PM, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> 
>>> On 19 August 2015 at 20:40, Programmingkid <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On Aug 19, 2015, at 3:25 PM, Peter Maydell wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> On 18 August 2015 at 14:12, Programmingkid <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>>> Do you think this should be a Google Summer of Code project?
>>>> 
>>>> I guess it's probably a size that would work for a GSoC
>>>> project with a suitably capable and enthusiastic student.
>>>> 
>>>> Are you asking because you would want to do it as a GSoC
>>>> project yourself, or because you'd like to see it on the list
>>>> so somebody might apply and volunteer to do it?
>>> 
>>> I would do it myself but I don't know too much about hypervisors,
>>> so I'm hoping there is someone else out there who is far more
>>> qualified to do it. This will probably take a GSOC student to do it.
>>> Maybe I will add this to the 2016 GSOC page if it exists yet.
>> 
>> I spoke to Alex Graf, who said he'd had a look into the OSX
>> hypervisor API. Apparently the amount of work required to
>> support this would be more than my initial glance at the API
>> suggested, so it's really too large to be a GSOC project.
>> Also a major problem is that it would be a large amount of
>> code which would need to be maintained into the future by
>> somebody, which makes a GSOC project a poor fit -- GSOC
>> students often don't stick around after the end of the summer,
>> so there wouldn't be a maintainer for the code.
> 
> Do you think it would be possible to use VirtualBox's hypervisor with QEMU on 
> Mac OS X, and/or Linux, and/or Windows?

Yes and no. The virtualbox kernel interface consists of 2 ioctls:

  - copy code into executable kernel space
  - jump to offset in that code in kernel mode

So all of the logic of vbox is implemented in an additional blob that needs to 
get loaded on demand. There are no guarantees for stable interfaces to that 
blob whatsoever.


Alex