Virtualization News Archives


570 Virtualization open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.

LXD 5.21 LTS Released With UI By Default, AMD SEV Memory Encryption For VMs
LXD 5.21 LTS Released With UI By Default, AMD SEV Memory Encryption For VMs

Ahead of next month's Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release, Canonical has released LXD 5.21 as the newest feature update to this container and VM manager. LXD 5.21 now ships with a production-grade graphical user interface by default, brings AMD SEV support for memory encryption of VMs on EPYC CPUs, object storage support, and other features.

15 March 2024 - LXD 5.21 - 8 Comments
VirtualBox KVM Backend Adds Support For SR-IOV Graphics
VirtualBox KVM Backend Adds Support For SR-IOV Graphics

Announced one month ago by Cyberus Technology was an open-source KVM back-end for VirtualBox. This work by Cyberus allows for using the KVM hypervisor with VirtualBox as opposed to its custom kernel module maintained by Oracle. That KVM back-end has now been extended to support SR-IOV graphics virtualization.

8 March 2024 - SR-IOV For VirtualBox KVM - 27 Comments
Cyberus Develops Open-Source KVM Backend For VirtualBox
Cyberus Develops Open-Source KVM Backend For VirtualBox

Cyberus Technology announced today the open-source release of a KVM back-end developed for VirtualBox. This new back-end allows the VirtualBox VMM to run virtual machines utilizing the Linux KVM hypervisor instead of the custom kernel module relied upon by the standard Oracle VM VirtualBox software.

8 February 2024 - KVM Backend For VirtualBox - 62 Comments
Amazon Proposes Pkernfs For Better Handling Hypervisor Live Updates
Amazon Proposes Pkernfs For Better Handling Hypervisor Live Updates

Stemming from work done at Amazon Web Services (AWS) for better handling hypervisor live updates, a "request for comments" patch series was sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list for Pkernfs. The Pkernfs proposal was first detailed publicly by AWS last year and is for persisting guest memory and kernel/device state safely across Kexec.

6 February 2024 - pkernfs - 3 Comments
Linux Dealing With x86 32-bit Software Security Issue For Intel TDX & AMD SEV
Linux Dealing With x86 32-bit Software Security Issue For Intel TDX & AMD SEV

AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) are intended to help provide better security for virtual machines and are key elements to both companies investments around confidential computing. It turns out they have a common enemy in their VM security goals: x86 32-bit software.

8 December 2023 - int 0x80 - 1 Comment
Distrobox 1.6 Released For Easily Launching New Distros Within Your Terminal
Distrobox 1.6 Released For Easily Launching New Distros Within Your Terminal

Distrobox 1.6 released on Sunday for this open-source project that makes it easy to launch any Linux distribution inside your terminal. Distrobox builds upon Podman and Docker to allow creating containers of the Linux distribution of your choice and for that to integrate nicely with the host environment. With succeeding releases, Distrobox has built up quite an arsenal of features.

20 November 2023 - Distrobox 1.6 - 18 Comments
AMD Closing In On IOMMU SVA Support For Linux
AMD Closing In On IOMMU SVA Support For Linux

The IOMMU changes for Linux 6.7 aren't particularly noteworthy besides adding SMMUv2 support for the Qualcomm SDM670 and SM7150 SoCs. But the IOMMU updates also take the kernel one step away from supporting Shared Virtual Addressing (SVA) on AMD platforms in the near future.

9 November 2023 - Shared Virtual Addressing - 5 Comments
Cloud-Hypervisor 36 Brings AMD CPU Topology Support, AIO Backend For Block Devices
Cloud-Hypervisor 36 Brings AMD CPU Topology Support, AIO Backend For Block Devices

Cloud Hypervisor 36 has been released as this Rust-written VMM that started out as an Intel open-source project that since was folded into the Linux Foundation umbrella with support from Microsoft, Arm, and other vendors. More recently even the likes of AMD and Ampere Computing have been onboard with this cloud and security focused virtualization hypervisor.

9 November 2023 - Cloud Hypervisor 36 - 1 Comment
Linux 6.7 Adds A Cross-Vendor Solution For Confidential Computing Attestation Reports
Linux 6.7 Adds A Cross-Vendor Solution For Confidential Computing Attestation Reports

While confidential computing is a hot area right now, there's been a limited amount of cross-vendor cooperation with AMD having their own route with Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel designing the Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) that is still available in limited form. As one improvement coming with Linux 6.7, "configfs-tsm" has been submitted for pulling as a cross-vendor solution for confidential computing attestation reports.

3 November 2023 - configfs-tsm - Add A Comment
Loongson Preparing LoongArch KVM Virtualization For Linux 6.7
Loongson Preparing LoongArch KVM Virtualization For Linux 6.7

The past several Linux kernel cycles has seen Loongson engineers working on implementing more kernel features for LoongArch, the MIPS-derived and RISC-V-inspired architecture out of China for domestic PCs. The performance of LoongArch CPUs so far still aren't competitive to x86_64 or Arm hardware but at least slowly are becoming more practical with more features being wired up. The latest milestone is the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization support appearing ready ahead of Linux 6.7.

2 October 2023 - LoongArch KVM - 8 Comments
Microsoft Adds AMD SEV-SNP & Intel TDX Guest Support To Hyper-V With Linux 6.6
Microsoft Adds AMD SEV-SNP & Intel TDX Guest Support To Hyper-V With Linux 6.6

Microsoft continues improving the Hyper-V support within the Linux kernel for benefiting Linux guest VMs running within this hypervisor on Windows. With Linux 6.6 the Hyper-V code adds support for SEV-SNP secure guests on the AMD EPYC side while over on the Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids side is initial support for Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) protected guests.

4 September 2023 - Hyper-V Secure Guests - Add A Comment
Unaccepted Memory Merged For Linux 6.5, Helping AMD SEV-SNP + Intel TDX
Unaccepted Memory Merged For Linux 6.5, Helping AMD SEV-SNP + Intel TDX

As was anticipated, UEFI Unaccepted Memory support was successfully merged for Linux 6.5 to support this standard that's important with the likes of Intel Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) and AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Page (SEV-SNP) backed virtual machines.

7 July 2023 - UEFI Unaccepted Memory - 1 Comment
VFIO In Linux 6.5 Adds Support For The AMD CDX Bus
VFIO In Linux 6.5 Adds Support For The AMD CDX Bus

The Virtual Function I/O "VFIO" changes were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.5 kernel merge window. This IOMMU/device agnostic framework has added an AMD CDX driver this cycle along with other improvements for this subsystem that is important to the Linux virtualization stack.

3 July 2023 - AMD CDX + VFIO - Add A Comment
Cloud Hypervisor 33 Released With TDX Fix, New D-Bus API
Cloud Hypervisor 33 Released With TDX Fix, New D-Bus API

Cloud Hypervisor has advanced quite nicely in the half-year it's been around since Intel software engineers began writing this Rust-based cloud-focused virtualization hypervisor. This VMM project has since become more independent and regularly receiving code contributions from the likes of Arm, Microsoft, and Tencent while also gaining the support of companies like AMD and Ampere. On Thursday marked the release of Cloud Hypervisor 33.

30 June 2023 - Cloud Hypervisor 33 - Add A Comment
Google's Patches To Speed-Up Over-Committed Linux Guest VMs Are Looking Great
Google's Patches To Speed-Up Over-Committed Linux Guest VMs Are Looking Great

Google engineers have been working on Linux patches to improve the guest VM performance when the host encounters memory pressure or have over-committed too many guests. Similar patches already are used on Chrome OS and Google has been working to upstream the functionality under the mainline Linux kernel and have now provided some reference benchmark results.

9 June 2023 - Faster VM Performance - 12 Comments
Linux 6.5 VirtIO GPU DRM Driver Adding Sync Object uAPI For Vulkan
Linux 6.5 VirtIO GPU DRM Driver Adding Sync Object uAPI For Vulkan

Queued via drm-misc-next and now on its way to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.5 cycle is support in the VirtIO GPU DRM driver for the synchronization object user-space API. This is important for Vulkan and is working with the Venus/Virgl driver context as well as Intel/AMDGPU/Freedreno native contexts too.

7 June 2023 - VirtIO Sync Objects - 2 Comments
Qualcomm Continues Working To Upstream Gunyah Hypervisor Support In Linux
Qualcomm Continues Working To Upstream Gunyah Hypervisor Support In Linux

Near the start of 2022 engineers out of the Qualcomm Innovation Center posted Linux driver patches for their Gunyah hypervisor. Gunyah is an open-source type-1 hypervisor developed by Qualcomm with an emphasis on security and other features. More than one year later the Gunyah drivers have yet to be upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel but work on them persists.

1 May 2023 - Qualcomm Gunyah - Add A Comment
Google Posts KVM-CPUFreq Driver To Dramatically Boost VM Performance, Power Efficiency
Google Posts KVM-CPUFreq Driver To Dramatically Boost VM Performance, Power Efficiency

Google engineers on Thursday posted initial "request for comments" patches on their KVM-CPUFreq driver that is part of their effort to improve the dynamic voltage and frequency scaling behavior and task placement within KVM-based virtual machines. This effort is leading to big improvements in raw performance and performance-per-Watt for tasks running within Linux VMs.

31 March 2023 - KVM-CPUFreq - 19 Comments
XCP-ng Initating Effort To Rewrite Xen Components In Rust
XCP-ng Initating Effort To Rewrite Xen Components In Rust

The focus of this new effort isn't to immediately rewrite the Xen virtualization hypervisor in Rust but to begin gradually working toward rewriting some of the smaller Xen Project components in the Rust programming language and to see how everything pans out.

18 March 2023 - Xen In Rust? - 64 Comments
Intel-Led Cloud Hypervisor 30 Released With CLI Changes To Reduce The Binary Size
Intel-Led Cloud Hypervisor 30 Released With CLI Changes To Reduce The Binary Size

Cloud Hypervisor as a reminder is what started out as an open-source Intel project to develop a modern hypervisor focused on cloud workloads and with security being among the leading concerns. Cloud Hypervisor more recently is developed as a Linux Foundation project but with Intel's software engineers being among the leading contributors to the project along with the likes of Arm, Tencent, Bytedance, and Microsoft.

26 February 2023 - Cloud-Hypervisor 30.0 - Add A Comment
LoongArch Linux Patches Enable KVM Virtualization
LoongArch Linux Patches Enable KVM Virtualization

While LoongArch merged for Linux 5.19 last year, that initial kernel port to the Chinese CPU architecture wasn't entirely complete and some Loongson 3A5000 features are still being enabled for the mainline kernel. The latest feature work being carried out by Loongson engineers is for supporting hardware virtualization on the 3A5000 processors with KVM.

15 February 2023 - LoongArch KVM - Add A Comment
libvirt 9.0 Released For Latest Linux Virtualization API
libvirt 9.0 Released For Latest Linux Virtualization API

Libvirt 9.0 was released on Monday as the newest version of this Linux Virtualization API. This virtualization API backed by Red Hat continues to support a wide range of hypervisors and with the v9.0 release has added additional functionality.

17 January 2023 - libvirt 9.0 - 13 Comments

570 Virtualization news articles published on Phoronix.