Re: KVM usability

From: Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues <lmr@redhat.com>
To: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>, Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>,
	"Zhang, Yanmin" <yanmin_zhang@linux.intel.com>,
	ming.m.lin@intel.com, sheng.yang@intel.com,
	Jes Sorensen <Jes.Sorensen@redhat.com>,
	KVM General <kvm@vger.kernel.org>,
	Zachary Amsden <zamsden@redhat.com>,
	Gleb Natapov <gleb@redhat.com>,
	Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>,
	Fr??d??ric Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>,
	Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>,
	Cole Robinson <crobinso@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: KVM usability
Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:00:24 -0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1267732824.5322.57.camel@localhost.localdomain> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1267524666.25158.38.camel@laptop>

On Tue, 2010-03-02 at 11:11 +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-03-01 at 09:14 -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> > The real 
> > question to ask is, why are you using qemu directly instead of using 
> > virt-manager? 
> 
> Because I suspect Ingo, like me, is a command line user, launching a gui
> to start kvm when there is a kvm command around just sounds daft.
> 
> Also, I just installed and tried it, virt-manager is a total piece of
> shit, 

That statement is far from being fair. I use virt-manager quite a lot,
since I want to keep track of what's going on on KVM virtualization for
end users in Fedora. What's shipped with Fedora 12 is pretty decent in
many regards, but as in any other software there's plenty of room for
improvements.

> I wouldn't even know how to begin telling it how to start my
> freshly baked kernel with serial console on stdio and some block image I
> just created from the gentoo stage3 tarball.

Fair enough, it is convoluted to do what you want using virt-manager
(although possible), but mainly because this wasn't a use case for it.
You can't expect the application designers to support every single type
of work flow under the sun.

> That is, after 5 minutes clicking I have no idea how to even launch an
> ISO with the thing, I prefer reading the kvm manpage over using some
> mouse only gui crap like that.

For the 1st thing you wanted to do, I agree that it was cumbersome. But
to create a VM and make it boot an ISO available on your hard drive it
*is* trivial. There's a wizard to do it, because it's the main use case
of the thing.

If you want to point out problems on virt-manager that is fine, and the
developers will do what is possible to address problems, insults are not
necessary.