Re: KVM architecture docs

Avi Kivity
2008-03-03T18:23:27Z

Alessandro Sardo wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm interested in learning the technical details of KVM, possibly up to
> date with latest versions (KVM changes so fast!). I'm not really geared
> to development (yet), rather I would like to study its architecture from
> a security point of view.
>
> I've searched anywhere and all I could find was some basic/marketing
> stuff, or simple white papers explaining HW virtualization. The wiki
> currently has some details, but none of them are satisfying enough for
> my needs :-)
>
> If you're familiar with Xen, I'm looking for the KVM equivalent versions
> of the following docs:
>
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/papers/2003-xensosp.pdf
> http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenArchitecture?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=Xen+Architecture_Q1+2008.pdf
>
> Does anything like that exist, or should I go the long way studying QEMU
> and KVM sources?
>
>

http://ols.108.redhat.com/2007/Reprints/kivity-Reprint.pdf

Outdated, but as a high level overview should suffice. The biggest
change in terms of architecture is that we now use regular Linux
userspace memory for the guest, which means that normal Linux memory
management applies to the guest. This includes swapping, memory
sharing, large page support, NUMA page placement and migration, etc.

--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function