KVM Gets Improved For S390, POWER & MIPS

The KVM virtualization update for Linux 3.16 brings improvements mostly for less common CPU architectures. With the Linux 3.17 kernel should come more interesting work for x86 fans but KVM on IA64 is likely to get the boot.

Paolo Bonzini sent in the Kernel-based Virtual Machine changes this morning for the Linux 3.16 kernel. This pull request brings a lot of changes for IBM's S390 architecture with regard to optimizations, support for migration, GDB support, and other improvements. Within the ARM space the only noteworthy change was support for the PSCI 0.2 hyper-call interface.

KVM with Linux 3.16 has initial support for POWER8 and little-endian host support. Also improved in the POWER space is support for running U-Boot on embedded POWER targets.

Another architecture getting boosted by Linux KVM in 3.16 is MIPS with completing its user-space interface and improving the handling of virtualized timer hardware.

Within the x86 space, Bonzini says a larger set of changes is scheduled for 3.17, but there are some bug-fixes and support for running nestedfully-virtualized Xen clients plus some optimizations.

An architecture not receiving any love with the KVM pull for Linux 3.16 is IA64 and apparently the KVM IA64 support is expected to be removed in Linux 3.17 over lack of activity.

The KVM feature pull request for the Linux 3.16 kernel can be found on the kernel mailing list.