Re: VMX ideas

[Joerg Roedel <joro@8bytes.org>]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 03:52:21PM +0100, Alexander Graf wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> I really do like KVM and would love to make using it a complete no- 
> brainer user experience. For the average user, loading a kernel module  
> (and unloading it) isn't really one of the most common tasks.
> 
> So I was considering to automatically load kvm-intel and kvm-amd on  
> bootup, when the CPU has a CPUID flag. Unfortunately it doesn't work  
> that easily. VMX enters Root mode, setting a page to use for the VMCS.  
> KVM sets up this page when the kvm-intel module gets loaded. This  
> means, as soon as kvm-intel is modprobe'd, vmware, virtual box,  
> parallels and the like are screwed.
> From a distribution perspective, this isn't exactly an ideal situation.
> 
> So I was thinking hard on what to do to circumvent this problem and  
> came up with several approaches:

If you want to allow parallel execution of different hypervisors at the
same time you have a similar problem with SVM because you don't know
which hypervisor uses which ASID.

Joerg