kvm

Kernel-based Virtual Machine

KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is virtualization software for Linux. It is based on the hardware virtualization extensions provided by Intel VT and AMD-V technologies. KVM kernel modules provide a control interface at /dev/kvm which the qemu-kvm user-space program uses to provide a hybrid emulated and actual hardware environment sufficent to run various PC operating systems (guests) in unmodified form, including Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Since qemu-kvm is derived from the qemu processor emulator sources it also is able to run guests using processor emulation mode, but with the expected performance impact. Conversely, hardware virtualization features outside the processor such as iommu and sr-iov are used by KVM allowing for improved performance. The seabios, vgabios and gpxe open source projects are also pulled from to provide the firmware components included. To increase performance over emulated hardware devices virtio drivers are supported, and in the case of Windows, included. KVM is compatible with various VM management solutions, including libvirt, virt-manager and vm-install.