14 DAY TRIAL // According to Avi Kivity, lead developer and maintainer of the Kernel based Virtual Machine project (kvm for short), the latest release of kvm comes with major performance improvements and Vista Support. The kvm project became part of the Linux kernel this Febrauary once with the release of the 2.6.20 kernel version. kvm, as the name states for itself, stands for a full virtualization system addressed to the x86-badsed Linux computers, and which allows the user to run multiple virtual machines with Linux or Windows images; the virtual machine has its own virtualized hardware configuration.
kvm joins the other virtualization and emulation solutions currently existing on the software market, such as VMWare, Xen and Qemu. Unlike VMware, kvm is open source, being also much smaller. It differs from Xen by its small size too. It uses qemu for the emulation of the I/O hardware and also as a general user interface.
Compared to the previous kvm-21 version, this new release brings significant performance improvement and also promises a better API/ABI stability once with the 2.6.22 Linux kernel. kvm-23, unlike kvm-22, supports guest reboots even on 64-bit Linux machines, which in kvm-22 would have crashed.
Highlights:
- fixed bugs - for example now time runs at double speed on x86_64 Linux because of the longstanding bug fixing - Windows Vista 32-bit support - support for kvm abi 10 modules - minor updates
kvm is currently implemented as a loadable kernel module, but the future versions are expected to be based on a system call interface and be incorporated into the kernel. There are also some features that kvm cannot provide for the moment, such as: guest SMP support, more paravirtualized devices and it also cannot run without hardware extensions.