Topaz and KVM/Qemu

[piddy]

Hello people,

I was asked to do some research regarding multiple operating systems/VMs on a QorIQ  T1040RDB SoC.

It seems that Topaz and KVM/Qemu both are solid solutions. The only problem i have is that i am not sure how to pick one.

There is some information, and in comments on this page it's mentioned that topaz can get more performance but KVM is more robust .

Virtualization Solutions in Freescale Linux SDK(1)– Hypervisor(topaz)

Now i wonder if someone knows why this is?

I understand that there is a difference in design between the two, but they seem to be able to take advantage of same hardware resources?

I can't find any real comparisons or benchmarks.

Is the biggest difference in design, documentation and maintenance or am i missing something?

Thanks already !

[scottwood]

Yiping seems to be referring to the lack of perfect isolation when sharing the datapath between multiple partitions, which is true, but I wouldn't call KVM "more robust" in general.

KVM has a lot of advantages, such as:

- can timeshare a cpu between multiple guests

- widely used with lots of supporting tools

- runs on top of Linux, which means:

   - can share data with Linux (disk images, networking, shared memory, etc)

   - can run in parallel with host Linux applications that don't pay the performance penalty of virtualization

Topaz is a lightweight standalone partitioning hypervisor.  It is faster than KVM, but not as featureful.