4 ms·
Could someone please ELI5 this to me? It's not clear to me what KVM even is? how does this new thing fit into a PC boot process and what it does? Why is it call
by akavel 7y ago
Could someone please ELI5 this to me? It's not clear to me what KVM even is? how does this new thing fit into a PC boot process and what it does? Why is it called firmware? What's so exciting in it that people upvoted it to ~100 points on HN? TIA!
- sjagoe 7y agoKVM is the Kernel-based Virtual Machine [1], a hypervisor system in the Linux Kernel. The firmware in question is, as I (minimally) understand it, like a PC BIOS, that does the initial system bootstrapping. So it's not firmware on the physical host, but acts as firmware in the virtualized host. I don't know enough about KVM to know why this firmware is significant, but I have seen some of QEMU (which can use KVM for its hypervisor) requiring a kernel image separate from the virtual host disk image. This firmware loads a kernel from the disk image itself, like a kernel is loaded from disk on a physical host. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine
- bonzini 7y agoQEMU runs a full-blown firmware (SeaBIOS or UEFI) so it does not need this. You can, if you want, pass the kernel on a command line but it's not the default. However, Firecracker can only boot from a manually-provided kernel so you need this in order to boot from a partition. It is still not a complete replacement for e.g. Grub, which supports boot from various filesystems and from LVM, including encrypted logical volumes.
- criddell 7y agoI thought it was firmware for a keyboard-video-mouse box.