Preliminary Support Allows Linux KVM To Boot Xen HVM Guests

As one of the most interesting patch series sent over by an Oracle developer in quite a while at least on the virtualization front, a "request for comments" series was sent out on Wednesday that would enable the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to be able to boot Xen HVM guests.

The 39 patches touching surprisingly just over three thousand lines of code allow for Linux's KVM to run unmodified Xen HVM images as well as development/testing of Xen guests and Xen para-virtualized drivers. This approach is different from other efforts in the past of tighter Xen+KVM integration.

On the hypervisor side the approach is similar to how Microsoft HyperV was supported with x86 KVM while the back-end side is re-using Xen code. Several different Oracle developers were involved in this project.

More details on this early stage work via this patch series. It will be very interesting to follow this work to see if there's enough upstream support to ultimately get this KVM addition merged in the months ahead to the mainline kernel.