Hi; I would like some short answers re: my KVM installation. I have been reading all morning and I think I have captured the basic ideas. I am just a little tentative about actually starting to use it. Therefore I have a series of questions. I can and have guessed at the answers but a quick confirmation would help. 1) I have a little qui called Virtual Machine Manager in Fedora 8. It shows me "gemu disconnected", if I want KVM should I connect it? What else should I do first. The KVM modules are loaded. 2) Briefly what is qemu's relationsship to KVM? I don't mean abstractly, I mean, do I use qemu commands in the commandline or is KVM the guiding light? Or, is it; it depends? 3) Are there special utilities or frontends for working with KVM? I have gotten the following quotes from: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-linux-kvm/?ca=dgr-lnxw02aLinuxKVM 4) "This machine may or may not support virtualization directly, which then requires support by the next layer, called the hypervisor." -- Does my machine support virtualization directly? How do I know? Will I be using a hypervisor? 5) "This hypervisor looks just like a regular Linux kernel on which you can run any other application." -- Is the hypervisor/linux kernel referred to, my existing kernel or is it some new kernel? If so, where did I get it? 6) "But this kernel can also support guest operating systems, loaded through the kvm utility." -- What is the kvm utility? Would it be different from my Virtual Machine Manager gui? 7) "Instantiation of a new guest operating system is provided by a utility called kvm. This utility works with the kvm module, using /dev/kvm to load a guest, associate it with the virtual disk (a regular file in the host operating system), and then boot it." -- Tried sudo kvm; kvm not found. Do I have to modprobe kvm first? 'lsmod' says it is there. So does /dev. 8) "Using KVM is actually quite simple if your hardware supports it. You need a processor that has virtualization support: You can tell whether your system supports virtualization by looking at /proc/cpuinfo. This file specifies whether the vmx (Intel) or svm (AMD) extensions are supported. ]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow rep_good pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy **svm** extapic cr8_legacy 9) "Next, you need a Linux kernel with KVM support enabled. You do this in the kernel configuration under Device Drivers > Virtualization. You must also enable processor support for your environment. You must have the kvm and qemu user-space applications, as well." -- Do I need to do this? Isn't modprobe kvm enough? I have ~]$ lsmod | grep kvm kvm_amd 24149 0 kvm 69657 1 kvm_amd 10) "Using a booted kernel with virtualization support enabled, the next step is to create a disk image for the guest operating system. You do so with qeumu-img, as shown below. Note that the size of the image is 4 GB, but using QEMU's copy-on-write format (qcow), the file will grow as needed instead of occupying the full 4 GB." $ qemu-img create -f qcow vm-disk.img 4G -- What is the disk image? I don't yet have an extra operating system to image? Is this preparing another/extra kernel space? 11) "With your virtual disk created, load the guest operating system into it. The following example assumes that the guest operating system is on a CD-ROM. In addition to populating the virtual disk with the CD-ROM ISO image, you must boot the image when it's done." $ kvm -no-acpi -m 384 -cdrom guestos.iso -hda vm-disk.img -boot d -- Keeping in mind I want to have a second Linux OS to play, explore and hack, where do I get the extra kernel and how do I load it not using a cdrom? And, next, where and when does 'git' get into it? I have created an new user account to work out of for this project. Is there some best place to put these extra OSs, trucks and source files in the new user account. I want to aggressively play around without risking my existing system. -- Regards Bill