KVM Virtualization Updates For Linux 5.5 Are Particularly Busy On The AMD/Intel Side

Written by Michael Larabel in Virtualization on 30 November 2019 at 07:25 PM EST. Add A Comment
VIRTUALIZATION
The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) improvements were sent in earlier this week for the Linux 5.5 kernel and they appear to be busier than usual on the x86 (Intel / AMD) side for the open-source virtualization stack.

Some of the KVM changes to find with Linux 5.5 include:

- XSAVES (Save Processor Extended States Supervisor) support for AMD processors.

- Retpolines optimizations for helping with the Spectre V2 mitigation offset.

- Support for nested 5-level page tables (allowing access to more system memory).

- PMU virtualization optimizations as well as for nested PMU virtualization.

- IOAPIC optimizations.

- More tweaking around the TAA (TSX ASync Abort) code.

- Various Arm + S390 + PowerPC improvements.

The complete list of the KVM changes for Linux 5.5 can be found via the pull request.
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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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