KVM Brings Some Improvements To Linux 3.20
![VIRTUALIZATION](/assets/categories/virtualization.webp)
Highlights of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates for Linux 3.20 include:
- A new optional feature to add a small amount of polling on each executed HLT instruction in the guest, for improving latency by up to 50% for some scenarios. Right now this is a feature that needs to be manually toggled but in the future could be auto-tuned.
- KVM on ARM/AArch64 now supports GICv3 emulation and dirty page tracking. GICv3 is a new version of ARM interrupt controllers introduced last year to the Linux kernel that allow supporting more than eight CPUs, message-based interrupts, and other capabilities.
- Optimizations and fixes for s390 architecture.
- KVM for x86 in Linux 3.20 has support for Page Modification Logging, a new feature of Intel "Broadwell" Xeons tp speed up dirty page tracking.
- Nested virtualization improvements/optimizations for KVM on x86.
More details on the KVM changes for the Linux 3.20 kernel can be found via this pull request.
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