Microsoft Prepping Linux For Running As 64-bit ARM Hyper-V Guest

While Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor and their Azure cloud has largely been x86_64 focused, with the Linux 5.13 kernel they are moving further for supporting Linux as a ARM64 Hyper-V guest.

Microsoft's Hyper-V changes that were merged last week for the Linux 5.13 kernel include VMBus enhancements and other work, but arguably most notable are new patches for "running Linux as Arm64 Hyper-V guest."

Those Hyper-V changes are shifting around CPU architecture neutral code and other low-level alterations to the Microsoft hypervisor code. Nothing really juicy from the patches themselves but will ultimately be interesting to see how 64-bit ARM with Hyper-V and presumably Azure ARM64 in due course will play out.

Linux 5.13 is fairly exciting in general on the ARM64 front with early Apple M1 support and other new ARM SoC/platform support.

The ARM64 arch pull last week also brought MTE async support for the Kernel Address Sanitizer, running kernel mode SIMD with soft IRQs disabled for better performance, Apple M1 prepping, and other minor improvements.

If not interested in Hyper-V, Linux 5.13 does also bring many new KVM features for ARM64 and Intel/AMD x86_64 too.