Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2007 18:48:44 +0200 From: Avi Kivity <avi(a)qumranet.com&gt; To: "Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange(a)redhat.com&gt; CC: kvm-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [kvm-devel] QEMU / KVM support in libvirt & virt-manager Daniel P. Berrange wrote: > On Sun, Feb 25, 2007 at 07:32:58AM +0200, Avi Kivity wrote: > >> Daniel P. Berrange wrote: >> >>> FYI, as of libvirt 0.2.0 and virt-manager 0.3.1 there is now >>> (experimental!) >>> support for managing virtual machines running under QEMU or KVM >>> virtualization >>> platforms, as well as the existing Xen support. >>> >> Great; as I see it hit FC6-updates I'll give it a shot. >> >> One thing I saw is that it pulls in Xen as part of the dependencies; >> perhaps a libvirt-xen and libvirt-kvm subpackage split is called for? > > Yeah, we've not figured out exactly how to address that dependancy > issue yet - the libvirt.so has to link to libxenstore as part of the > Xen driver, so even if you only want to manage QEMU instances we still > end up pulling in Xen. We're certainly going to make it possible to > turn off the Xen stuff at compile time. Not clear how we'd address the > RPM dep issue though because the Fedora builds of libvirt will include > both Xen & QEMU support. Perhaps we'll have to try a dlopen() approach. I would suggest a /usr/lib/libvirt/xen.so and a /usr/lib/libvirt/qemu.so, which are enumerated by reading /usr/lib/libvirt, and dlopen()ed by libvirt.so. Only /usr/lib/libvirt/xen.so links to libxenstore. That way, a third party can add a backend by dropping a .so into /usr/lib/libvirt, and libvirt.so itself has no backend-related dependencies -- it doesn't know anything concrete about the backends, in fact.