About the build of QEMU on Kata Containers
Hi all, While working on updating the version of QEMU [1] used on the project, for some occasions people outside asked me why the project builds QEMU from source instead of relying on distro's provided. When I started contributing to this project I asked it myself many times but I never looked for an answer. I can think on many reasons but I would be guessing. So If someone could share the rationale here, I would appreciate it. Perhaps more important, we could discuss if the scenario stands the same so that we should stick with that approach or if we could manage the QEMU build differently nowadays. [1] https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/pull/1349 Thanks in advance, Wainer dos Santos Moschetta Software Engineer, Red Hat, Brazil
Hi Wainer My two cents * Performance - Smaller memory footprint - Better boot time * Smaller Attack surface - custom Kconfig * Kata needs features that some distros may not support it because they are considered insecure, unstable or too new, for example: - 9p - libpmem/nvdimm - vsocks -- Julio On Mon, 2021-03-08 at 12:41 -0300, Wainer dos Santos Moschetta wrote:
Hi all,
While working on updating the version of QEMU [1] used on the project, for some occasions people outside asked me why the project builds QEMU from source instead of relying on distro's provided. When I started contributing to this project I asked it myself many times but I never looked for an answer.
I can think on many reasons but I would be guessing. So If someone could share the rationale here, I would appreciate it. Perhaps more important, we could discuss if the scenario stands the same so that we should stick with that approach or if we could manage the QEMU build differently nowadays.
[1] https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/pull/1349
Thanks in advance,
Wainer dos Santos Moschetta
Software Engineer, Red Hat, Brazil
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On Mon, Mar 08, 2021 at 12:41:51PM -0300, Wainer dos Santos Moschetta wrote:
Hi all,
While working on updating the version of QEMU [1] used on the project, for some occasions people outside asked me why the project builds QEMU from source instead of relying on distro's provided. When I started contributing to this project I asked it myself many times but I never looked for an answer.
I can think on many reasons but I would be guessing. So If someone could share the rationale here, I would appreciate it. Perhaps more important, we could discuss if the scenario stands the same so that we should stick with that approach or if we could manage the QEMU build differently nowadays.
I noticed that too while looking into kata-deploy a while ago. I agree using a standard build could remove a fairly major pain point and a flexibility obstacle. As for the reasons, unfortunately I can only guess as well but I noticed kata tends to patch QEMU sources before it builds them. If there are any custom patches among the ones that are applied (as opposed to just, say, backports of stuff from a higher QEMU version) that could explain the custom build, at least partly. In fact, even if the patches are just backports, it is conceivable that kata needs to use a specific version of QEMU for some reason but also needs some bits from a higher version, thus a custom build. pvl
participants (3)
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Montes, Julio
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Pavel Mores
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Wainer dos Santos Moschetta