Laptops and hardware virtualization

[Richard Pieri]

On Feb 16, 2010, at 7:12 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> 
> KVM does not run without the extension. QEMU is normally used with KVM,
> but can run alone and certainly does not require CPU virtualization.

Are you certain about that?  Some of my recent reading indicated that KVM can use QEMU's virtual CPU library, but I'll admit that I'm not as up on it as I should be.

> Hyper-V will not run without the virtualization extensions (but not on a
> laptop). VMWare and Virtualbox predate the virtualization extensions,
> anmd AFIK Xen has required the viritualization support for a number of
> years.

I don't count Hyper-V as a major player, but that's just me.

Xen requires virtualization in order to run unmodified guest operating systems.  Xen-aware kernels do not require hardware virtualization.

--Rich P.