KVM Virtualization Updates For Linux 5.5 Are Particularly Busy On The AMD/Intel Side

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) improvements were sent in earlier this week for the Linux 5.5 kernel and they appear to be busier than usual on the x86 (Intel / AMD) side for the open-source virtualization stack.

Some of the KVM changes to find with Linux 5.5 include:

- XSAVES (Save Processor Extended States Supervisor) support for AMD processors.

- Retpolines optimizations for helping with the Spectre V2 mitigation offset.

- Support for nested 5-level page tables (allowing access to more system memory).

- PMU virtualization optimizations as well as for nested PMU virtualization.

- IOAPIC optimizations.

- More tweaking around the TAA (TSX ASync Abort) code.

- Various Arm + S390 + PowerPC improvements.

The complete list of the KVM changes for Linux 5.5 can be found via the pull request.