KVM With Linux 6.8 Adds Intel LAM For Guests, More Confidential VMs Work

Written by Michael Larabel in Virtualization on 13 January 2024 at 10:30 AM EST. 1 Comment
VIRTUALIZATION
The KVM virtualization changes for the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel is quite heavy on the feature side.

There's a lot of KVM changes this cycle with some of the new v6.8 functionality including:

- Continued work around better supporting confidential VMs such as with the new KVM_SET_MEMORY_ATTRIBUTES ioctl for allowing user-space to specify per-page attributes for a given page of guest memory. This can be useful for confidential/secure VMs with the likes of AMD SEV-SNP, Intel TDX, and ARM pKVM.

- KVM on x86 also now supports "software-protected VMs" as currently a method of testing new interfaces around guest_memfd and the page attributes code.

- Advertising flush-by-ASID support for nSVM unconditionally on KVM to let the very latest versions of VMware Workstation work atop KVM.

- Intel Linear Address Masking (LAM) support for KVM guests.

- A new "CONFIG_KVM_HYPERV" Kconfig option to allow disabling KVM support for Microsoft Hyper-V emulation at build-time.

- ARM64 LPA2 support.

- KVM on LoongArch now allows for the LSX/LAX SIMD CPU instructions within KVM guest VMs.

- A variety of fixes and other improvements throughout the Kernel-based Virtual Machine code.

More details on the KVM changes for Linux 6.8 via this pull.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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