VKernel progress update - 9 Jan 2006

[Freddie Cash]

On Thursday 11 January 2007 03:16 pm, Bill Huey wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 11, 2007 at 10:59:39AM -0800, Matthew Dillon wrote:
> ...
>
> >     Linux has something similar (UML), but no BSD system has this
> > feature. All the BSDs rely on third party hardware virtualization
> > (vmware, xen, qemu, etc).
> >
> >     The linux code is fairly opaque.  It is almost universally
> > without any code comments so I am not sure whether they are using a
> > real page table (requiring UML to run as root), or whether they are
> > using a virtualized page table like we are (which allows us to run
> > without needing root creds).  Inquiring minds want to know!
>
> Linux also has KVM now and that does Xen kind of stuff.

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) (could they pick a worse name?) is a 
hardware-assisted, full-virtualisation process that runs a complete 
virtual machine as a single userland process on top of a Linux kernel.  
It *requires* an Intel or AMD processor that supports hardware 
virtualisation (Intel's VT or AMD's SVT).  Due to using hardware 
virtualisation, you can run any x86 OS in the VM.  Benchmarks at various 
online news sites shows KVM to be a little faster than Xen at some 
things, and a lot slower than Xen at others.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fcash at ocis.net