The news of KVM’s inclusion in the Linux kernel has me looking at KVM.

How the virtualization layer is implemented has important ramifications, and KVM is much different from Xen.

Xen itself sits directly on the hardware and treats even your old OS as a guest VM — for Xen, the Linux patches are necessary to make Linux a guest VM on the hypervisor. It implements a model known as paravirtualization that provides a lot of performance improvements over other recent x86 virtualization techniques such as VMware’s. This model includes a service VM that does privileged I/O work on behalf of the guests. (In a following entry I discuss some performance and efficiency issues, the larger story is not so simple as “paravirtualization makes everything very fast”)

Xen can also support unmodified guest VMs if you are using either a VT capable Intel processor or an SVM capable AMD processor.

KVM is a patch to the Linux kernel that is more like VServer, Solaris containers, or microkernels [see footnote], where the OS still sits directly on the hardware. Some aspects of the current KVM release (mostly pulled from their FAQ):

• KVM guest OSs appear as a process and can be managed with top, kill, etc.
• KVM requires either a VT capable Intel processor or an SVM capable AMD processor (which is a currently a big limitation for grid providers but this will become less and less of an issue as older clusters are phased out).
• Uses QEMU for guest instantiation, but is not an emulator itself
• Runs Windows 32bit already (with no apci)
• I have yet to figure out if it relies on these kernel enhancements for OS level virtualization
• The current implementation should probably be seen as a preview, Fraser Campbell reports that it was “decidedly slow” when he tried it.

[footnote]: Some argue that microkernels and Xen have a lot in common.

[UPDATE: This article on some KVM details was posted. Its comments also have a lot of information.]