Linux 5.16 KVM To Land RISC-V Hypervisor Support

Coming with the Linux 5.16 kernel cycle will be support for RISC-V virtualization with the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).

The RISC-V ISA recently settled on its hypervisor extension and its spec is now considered frozen. The hypervisor extension to the RISC-V instruction set is outlined here. Given that it's taken a while to freeze, there isn't yet any performant RISC-V processors out there actually implementing the complete extension and so for now and during development it's been a function of running it on simulators.

Merged into the Linux kernel's RISC-V development tree today is the RISC-V support in KVM.

These patches have been in the works for a while and finally came together after a number of revisions. So at least when there are speedy RISC-V processors out there having this hypervisor support, the Linux KVM code will be ready to go. In user-space, QEMU has its RISC-V support already in place.