are there plans to keep supporting qemu/kvm in illumos in the future or is it EOL for now?

fanta1: I'm not aware of any significant maintenance effort going into it. Bhyve has a lot of benefits and new work has all been in there.

Is there something you get from KVM that you can't from Bhyve?

I expect that SmartOS or maybe OmniOS folks will patch it if security issues are found, FWIW, but I'd encourage moving to Bhyve when you can

I've been talking to hadfl about getting an updated qemu into omnios for a project, but probably separate from the kvm qemu

I seem to recall there's years of gap and interface stuff and weirdness that probably nobody has time to deal with illumos-kvm for.

but if you were just wanting qemu, that might be coming

Yeah, a QEMU for, say, emulating ARM or some other CPU, vs. a QEMU for accelerated x86 virtualisation, would be doable

yes, that's basically what we'd been talking about

yeah we got qemu 7.1.0 built. however, there are a few rough edges still that probably require patcing. the aim to add it is definitely to emulate different arch and not to replace the patched qemu for kvm

*patching

There are also tools like qemu-img that are pretty useful outside of QEMU altogether

iirc that's what solaris ships in their userland. just the tools but not the emulators

It is somewhat unfortunate generally that qemu-img (where updates are often welcome, for new formats) is stapled to the QEMU emulator (where updates just always break something, and should be avoided if possible)

probably worth to build/ship the tools in a separate package then?

I suspect it might be yes!