- Convert qemu-kvm from a script to a symlink. This method of
invoking the QEMU emulator has been deprecated for some time,
but is still provided. It has as it's origins a version of QEMU
which had KVM acceleration enabled by default. In it's recent
incarnation it is a script which adds '-machine accel=kvm' to the
beginning of the list of command line options passed to the
emulator. This method collides with the now preferred method of
specifying acceleration options by using -accel. qemu-kvm is now
changed to simply be a symlink to the same QEMU binary which the
prior script exec'd. This new approach takes advantage of a built
in QEMU feature where if QEMU is invoked using a program name
ending in 'kvm', KVM emulation is enabled. This approach is
better in that it is more compatible with any other command line
option that may be added for specifying acceleration (not that
you should do that).
For those who have taken advantage of the fact that you can add
additional command line options to the qemu-kvm script, or doing
other things in that script you will just need to create an
alternate script "emulator" to achieve the same. It's possible
that there may be some very subtle behavioral difference in the
switch from a script to a symlink, but given that qemu-kvm is a
deprecated package, we're not going to worry about that.