Re: Paravirt KVM capabilities

Rusty Russell
2007-01-09T23:20:52Z

On Tue, 2007-01-09 at 16:27 +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:
> Hugo Mills wrote:
> > Does running paravirtual guests on KVM still require a
> > hardware-VM-capable processor, or will it eventually be possible to
> > run a paravirtualised Linux on an older machine (such as, say, a
> > first-generation Athlon 64)?
>
> It's also something for the Linux community in general to decide: if we
> want separate interfaces for paravirtualization and full virtualization
> (lhype and kvm) or a merged interface. I can see arguments in favor of
> both positions.

Yeah, me too.

Ignoring technical questions for a moment, the main issue is that lhype
doesn't have an ABI; you have to run the same(ish) kernel as guest and
host. This is by design: I wanted it to be a platform for
experimentation and hacking, because I think we're still at that stage
with x86 Linux virtualization.

That's not to say that I don't think we can share code, it's just
important to realize that our aims are different.

Cheers,
Rusty.