Re: [Qemu-devel] Luvalley project: enable Qemu to utilize hardware virtualization extensions on arbitrary operating system

[Blue Swirl <blauwirbel@gmail.com>]

On 3/26/09, Xiaodong Yi <xdong.yi@gmail.com> wrote:
> Luvalley is a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) spawned from the KVM
>  project. Its part of source codes are derived from KVM to virtualize
>  CPU instructions and memory management unit (MMU). However, its
>  overall architecture is completely different from KVM, but somewhat
>  like Xen. Luvalley runs outside of Linux, just like Xen's
>  architecture, but it still uses Linux as its scheduler, memory
>  manager, physical device driver provider and virtual IO device
>  emulator. Moreover, Luvalley may run WITHOUT Linux. In theory, any
>  operating system could take the place of Linux to provide the above
>  services. Currently, Luvalley supports Linux and Windows. That is to
>  say, one may run Luvalley to boot a Linux or Windows, and then run
>  multiple virtualized operating systems on such Linux or Windows.
>
>  In KVM, Qemu is adopted as the IO device emulator. From the point of
>  view of Qemu, KVM enables Qemu to utilize hardware virtualization
>  extensions such as Intel's VT on Linux. As for Luvalley, Qemu is also
>  adopted as its IO device emulator. However, Luvalley could enable Qemu
>  to utilize hardware virtualization extensions on ANY operating system.
>
>  If you are interested in Luvalley project, you may download Luvalley's
>  source codes from
>      http://sourceforge.net/projects/luvalley/

Interesting idea, maybe OpenBIOS or coreboot could be extended to
provide the hypervisor interface. For Qemu it would be desirable if
the same interface would be used as with plain KVM as far as possible.

Comparing Luvalley version of Qemu to released version, the changes
seem to be quick hacks with a lot of "#if 0". I guess KVM changes are
more radical.