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Comment by gbrown_ | Hacker News Reader

Semi hopping on the QEMU bashing train but recall Google ripped it out for GCE.

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/01/7-ways-we-harde...

Well, Google rightfully said that GCE does not need most QEMU features, so they have made a simplified version. Is is sad they did not release it.

On the other hand, there are people who need QEMU features: we have a QEMU-based test script for boot images which actually uses a few more exotic features to simulate the target environment.

The Google version is supposedly coupled heavily to their infrastructure and therefore would give little benefit to opensource without also open sourcing a large portion of their infrastructure.

> without also open sourcing a large portion of their infrastructure.

Well, that’d not necessarily be bad for the dev community.

Red Hat also rips virtfs out of QEMU in RHEL, for what it's worth.

Exactly. Ubuntu didn't and it wasted weeks of development for me.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1336794

Ripped it out implies that at one point they used it.

No, it means they run binaries compiled with source code from which this feature set has been removed.

That's not a correct interpretation either; it's noted in the linked article that GCE uses a proprietary VMM instead of QEMU which itself was "ripped out" of the standard KVM+QEMU arrangement.

I probably would have chosen gentler phrasing.

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