Kivity too started feeding in small changes from the kvm-userspace repository to the QEMU project. While all this was happening, Qumranet had changed direction, and was now pursuing desktop virtualization with KVM as the hypervisor. In September , Red Hat announced it would acquire Qumranet.
With the RHEL 5. With the release of RHEL 6. KVM continued enjoying out-of-the box support in other distributions as well. Present and future Today, there are several projects that use KVM as the default hypervisor: OpenStack and oVirt are the more popular ones. These projects concern themselves with large-scale deployments of KVM hosts and several VMs in one deployment.
These come with various use cases, and hence ask of different things from KVM. Keeping everything secure and reducing the hypervisor footprint are also being worked on. The ways in which a malicious guest can break out of its VM sandbox and how to mitigate such attacks is also a prime area of focus. A lot of advancement happens with new hardware updates and devices. However, a lot of effort is also spent in optimizing the current code base, writing new algorithms, and coming up with new ways to improve performance and scalability with the existing infrastructure.
For the next ten years, the main topics of discussion may well not be about the development of the hypervisor. More interesting will be to see how Linux gets used as a hypervisor, bringing better sandboxing for running untrusted code, especially on mobile phones, and running the cloud infrastructure, by being pervasive as well as invisible at the same time.
Nice article on the history of KVM. Just a couple of comments related to statements about Xen: Since Xen was introduced before the virtualization extensions were available on x86, it had to use a different design. I'm not sure exactly what this is supposed to mean. By the time KVM came out in , Xen had had support for unmodified guests for a year already. Perhaps it means that the interface for "domain 0", which is where you run the toolstack used to boot VMs on a Xen system, was designed before virtualization extensions were available; so the changes required to Linux run the control stack on Xen are more extensive than those required to run KVM.
That is certianly true. As an aside, the Xen community have been working on an update to this interface to allow dom0 to take advantage of the virtualization extensions. That should greatly reduce the footprint of Xen changes in Linux. Again, support for unmodified guest operating systems was already in place in Xen for a year by the time KVM was released. If you wanted to use a modified version of Linux for a normal guest you could, but it wasn't required.
It is certainly true that Xen uses its own cpu scheduler rather than Linux's, and that it has another layer of protection around memory and hardware management. That's the point really. Linux's scheduler is designed for processes primarily kernel compilations , and Xen's is designed for VMs. Linux provides a large rich interface which makes it difficult to provide strong isolation; Xen provides a much narrower interface which makes it easy to provide strong isolation.
The computer that runs a hypervisor is known as its host, while each VM on the host is known as a guest. A hypervisor provides the guests with a virtual operating platform that manages their operating systems OSs , allowing multiple OSs to share virtualized resources on the same host. The ability to share resources is one of the most significant reasons for a business to implement hypervisors.
However, the variety of hypervisors currently available can make this decision process challenging. VMware is the name of a company that develops a range of hypervisors, including the enterprise-class ESXi. KVM is an infrastructure for the Linux kernel that provides it with the capabilities of a hypervisor.
The following points of comparison can help organizations in need of a hypervisor choose between VMware and KVM. A hypervisor virtualizes a computing environment, meaning the guests in that environment share physical resources such as processing capability, memory and storage encompassing a private cloud.
This requirement means that a hypervisor must accurately emulate the physical hardware to prevent guests from accessing it except under carefully controlled circumstances. The method that a hypervisor uses to do this is a key factor in its performance. These drivers are OS-specific and often specific to a particular hypervisor. Hypervisors may be classified into two types, which can impact their performance.
Another advantage of this acquisition is that it will add SolidICE , desktop virtualization technology for thin clients, to Red Hat's enterprise software lineup. Overall, the acquisition seems to make a lot of sense for Red Hat and will give them an edge over other Linux distributors in the virtualization market. You must login or create an account to comment.
Further reading For more information about virtualization, check out our complete guide. One of the more exciting on-going developments involving KVM, and other vehicle manufacturers throughout the region, is the growing interest from Chinese vehicle manufacturers. Although its operations in Kenya are little more than a year old, the success Foton has already had through its partnership with KVM means that it already targeting sales of more than of its trucks across the regional market over the next two years.
It is announcements like this that have further drawn the attention of other large players in the sector. We are seeing such interest building as more Chinese businesses are now looking to acquire manufacturing capabilities in Africa. Otieno, however, knows there is a lot more the company can do to capitalise on this.
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