RISC-V Developers Continue Working On KVM Support

Going on for more than one year now is the effort for supporting KVM virtualization with the RISC-V architecture, which is very much important for RISC-V processors to be able to eventually take lift in the server space. The KVM RISC-V enablement work is now up to its nineteenth revision but not yet clear if it's ready for mainlining.

This KVM RISC-V support has been led by Western Digital who remains very active with various elements of RISC-V Linux support. With this long work-in-progress patch series they are able to boot RISC-V 32-bit and 64-bit guests with multiple virtual CPUs on RISC-V hardware. Still to be tackled in the future though is handling SBI (Supervisor Binary Interface) v0.2 emulation within the kernel, among other SBI v0.2 bits as well as in-kernel PLIC emulation and other features. Western Digital has also been working on a RISC-V ported kvmtool for demonstrating the RISC-V KVM support and making use of it while QEMU Git master already supports RISC-V too.

With this 19th spin of the KVM RISC-V patches the code has been re-based against the latest upstream Linux state, it now leverages a new KVM DebugFS interface, and drops the idea of initially having KVM RISC-V within the drivers staging area.

See this patch series for those interested in the forthcoming KVM RISC-V support.