-If you configure with --enable-supermin then we will build a supermin
-appliance (supermin = super-minimized). This is a very specialized
-appliance which is built on-the-fly at runtime (specifically, when you
-call guestfs_launch).
-
-The normal appliance is a self-contained Linux operating system, based
-on the Fedora/RHEL/CentOS Linux distro. So it contains a complete
-copy of all the libraries and programs needed, like kernel, libc,
-bash, coreutils etc etc.
-
-The supermin appliance removes the kernel and all the executable
-libraries and programs from the appliance. That just leaves a
-skeleton of config files and some data files, which is obviously
-massively smaller than the normal appliance. At runtime we rebuild
-the appliance on-the-fly from the libraries and programs on the host
-(eg. pulling in the real /lib/libc.so, the real /bin/bash etc.)
-
-Although this process of rebuilding the appliance each time sounds
-slow, it turns out to be faster than using the prebuilt appliance.
-(Most of the saving comes from not compressing the appliance - it
-transpires that decompressing the appliance is the slowest part of the
-whole boot sequence). On my machine, a new appliance can be built in
-under a fifth of a second, and the boot time is several seconds
-shorter.
-
-The big advantage of the supermin appliance for distributions like
-Fedora is that it gets security fixes automatically from the host, so
-there is no need to rebuild the whole of libguestfs for a security
-update in some underlying library.
-
-There are several DISADVANTAGES:
+Previous versions of libguestfs required something called "vmchannel".
+Vmchannel is a special device given to virtual machines which allows
+them to communicate in some way with the host, often (but not always)
+without using a traditional network device. In reality, there is no
+one thing called "vmchannel". This idea has been reimplemented
+several times under the name vmchannel, and other hypervisors have
+their own incompatible implementation(s) too.