Laptops and hardware virtualization

[Jarod Wilson]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 12:05 PM, Richard Pieri <richard.pieri-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Feb 16, 2010, at 11:02 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>>
>> A while back I tried to set up KVM on my system and it would would not
>> let me do it. I could configure and virtualize with QEMU, but not KVM. I
>> would double check on Xen as AFAIK, it has required hardware
>> virtualization for a number of years even with Xen-aware guests.
>
> I checked both.
>
> As of Xen 3.0, VT-x is required for unmodified guests (Windows 2000/XP) and "legacy" Linux guests.  The docs make no mention of VT-x being required for Xen-aware kernels.  Prior versions of Xen cannot run unmodified guests at all.
>
> Same applies for Citrix XenServer:
> http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/subfeature.asp?contentID=1681139
> "Intel® VT or AMD-V™ required for support of Windows guests"

Yeah, Xen most definitely supports both fully-virt and para-virt
guests. Fully-virt guests (aka HVM -- Harware Virtual Machine -- in
Xen parlance) require hardware virt extensions, para-virt guests do
not.


> The current KVM docs state that VT-x is required.  The use of QEMU is not for CPU emulation as I mistakenly believed; it is there to create VM instances and device emulation.

Correct. And Xen actually uses QEMU in pretty much the same way.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org