Re: [RFC PATCH 00/14] Support multiple KVM modules on the same host

[Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2026, Hou Wenlong wrote:
> Sorry for revisiting this topic after a long time. I haven't seen any
> new updates regarding this topic/series, and I didn’t find any recent
> activity on the GitHub repository. Is the multi-KVM topic still being
> considered for upstreaming, or is there anything blocking this?

We have abandoned upstreaming multi-KVM.  The operational cost+complexity is too
high relative to the benefits, especially when factoring in things like ASI and
live patching, and the benefits are almost entirely obsoleted by kernel live update
support.

> As Lai pointed out, we also have a similar multi-KVM implementation in
> our internal environment, so we are quite interested in this topic.
> Recently, when we upgraded our kernel version, we found that maintaining
> multi-KVM has become a significant burden.

Yeah, I can imagine the pain all too well.  :-/

> We are willing to move forward with it if multi-KVM is still accepted for
> upstream. So I look forward to feedback from the maintainers.
>
> From what I've seen, the recent patch set that enables VMX/SVM during
> booting is a good starting point for multi-KVM as well.

I have mixed feelings on multi-KVM.  Without considering maintenance and support
costs, I still love the idea of reworking the kernel to support running multiple
hypervisors concurrently.  But as I explained in the first cover letter of that
series[0], there is a massive amount of complexity, both in initial development
and ongoing maintenance, needed to provide such infrastructure:

 : I got quite far long on rebasing some internal patches we have to extract the
 : core virtualization bits out of KVM x86, but as I paged back in all of the
 : things we had punted on (because they were waaay out of scope for our needs),
 : I realized more and more that providing truly generic virtualization
 : instrastructure is vastly different than providing infrastructure that can be
 : shared by multiple instances of KVM (or things very similar to KVM)[1].
 :
 : So while I still don't want to blindly do VMXON, I also think that trying to
 : actually support another in-tree hypervisor, without an imminent user to drive
 : the development, is a waste of resources, and would saddle KVM with a pile of
 : pointless complexity.

For deployment to a relatively homogeneous fleet, many of the pain points can be
avoided by either avoiding them entirely or making the settings "inflexible",
because there is effectively one use case and so such caveats are a non-issue.
But those types of simplifications don't work upstream, e.g. saying "eVMCS is
unsupported if multi-KVM is possible" instead of moving eVMCS enabling to a base
module isn't acceptable.

So I guess my "official" stance is that I'm not opposed to upstreaming multi-KVM
(or similar) functionality, but I'm not exactly in favor of it either.  And
practically speaking, because multi-KVM would be in constant conflict with so
much ongoing/new feature support (both in software and hardware), and is not a
priority for anyone pursuing kernel live update, upstreaming would be likely take
several years, without any guarantee of a successful landing.

[0] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20251010220403.987927-1-seanjc@google.com
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/aOl5EutrdL_OlVOO@google.com