ARM Ports Linux KVM To AArch64/ARM64

Last year ARM Holdings published ARM KVM virtualization support. This support was for ARMv7 hardware using the ARM Cortex-A15 since it's the first 32-bit ARM processor to support hardware virtualization. Ahead of the debut of any 64-bit ARM (AArch64) hardware, KVM has now been ported to ARM64.

On Monday evening the set of 29 patches to port the Kernel-based Virtual Machine to ARM were posted by Marc Zyngier of ARM. "This series contains the implementation of KVM for arm64. It depends on the 'pre-arm64 rework' series I posted earlier, as well as on the tiny perf patch sent just after. The code is unsurprisingly extremely similar to the KVM/arm code, and a lot of it is actually shared with the 32bit version."

This AArch64 KVM support enablement includes support for 4k and 64k pages, 32-bit and 64-bit guests, and PSCI support for SMP booting. However, they don't yet have ARM 64-bit QEMU support, so for now the ARM64 KVM virtualization testing was done through KVM Tool.

The 64-bit ARM KVM virtualization patches can currently be found on the KVM mailing list and will be a likely candidate to be merged into the Linux 3.10 kernel in the coming months.