KVM & Xen Don't Change Much With Linux 4.15

Written by Michael Larabel in Virtualization on 18 November 2017 at 08:28 AM EST. 7 Comments
VIRTUALIZATION
There are a ton of exciting improvements building up in Linux 4.15, but not too much on the virtualization front.

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) work this time around isn't too exciting with no big ticket items debuting for Linux 4.15. KVM for this next kernel release finally has Python 3 support within the Python script that collects runtime statistics from the KVM kernel module. Most of the other work is relatively small additions and fixes. There is some optimizations to ARM's timer handling, PowerPC support for running in a hashed page table MMU mode and single-threaded mode support on POWER9, s390 prep work for exitless interrupts and crypto, and on the x86 front are some fixes, improved emulation in a few areas, and other small work.

The KVM changes are documented here.

The Xen pull request doesn't have too much either. Xen changes include VDSO support of the PV clock interface, support for Xen para-virtualized guests to handle Intel 5-level paging systems, and adding Xen pvcalls front-end driver using the para-virtualized socket interface.

Not part of these pull requests but perhaps most exciting about Linux 4.15 on the virtualization front is AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization support (SEV) for the new EPYC processors.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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