This guide explains how you can install and use KVM for creating and running virtual machines on a Debian Squeeze server. I will show how to create image-based virtual machines and also virtual machines that use a logical volume (LVM). KVM is short for Kernel-based Virtual Machine and makes use of hardware virtualization, i.e., you need a CPU that supports hardware virtualization, e.g.

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat includes an ARM cross-compiler to compile programs for Linux. The compiler can also be used for bare-metal programming with a few arrangements.

A tutorial that shows how to debug an ARM Linux program inside a platform emulated with QEMU. The tutorial uses gdbserver to connect the program executing in the guest system to the debugger running on the host system.

Both the code and its development model are seen as conforming much more closely to the Linux way of doing things than the alternatives; KVM is expected to be the long-term virtualization solution for Linux. So, one might well wonder, why has KVM been the topic of one of the more massive and less pleasant linux-kernel discussions in some time?

We're going to deliberately sidestep the jargon and the hype to take a practical look at the virtualisation technologies in Ubuntu, in particular KVM and Qemu and the related userspace tools that create and manage virtual machines. Although the discussion centres on Ubuntu, the technology is applicable to all Linux distros.

There's been a lot written about virtualization recently. However, the traditional apps like VMWare and VirtualBox have always had the problems of speed and integration into the host. Luckily, there is another option: andLinux, a full-blown Ubuntu Gutsy-based distro that has been around for quite a while.

If you have been using QEMU for emulating other operating systems, you will find that it runs fairly slow. On average, QEMU will only run at about 20% of the speed of your host system. Obviously, this is a problem.