NVMM Is NetBSD's New Hypervisor For Intel / AMD CPUs

Not to be confused with NVMe or any other memory/storage tech, NetBSD's NVMM is a new hypervisor that has been in-development the past half-year for Intel/AMD x86-64 processors and will premiere with the NetBSD 9.0 release.

NVMM consists of a kernel driver and a user-space virtualization library/API (libnvmm) that can interface with the likes of QEMU as a user-space emulator. The NVMM kernel driver is designed around the NetBSD kernel so has the ability to be more performant and better engineered than other pseudo-cross-platform kernel virtualization implementations. The AMD x86 SVM and Intel x86 VMX back-ends for NVMM currently support up to 128 virtual machines with each VM supporting up to 256 vCPUs and 128GB of system memory.

The QEMU support for NVMM is expected to be upstreamed soon.

The NVMM kernel support paired with the QEMU support can run the likes of NetBSD and other BSDs along with Linux and modern releases of Windows.

Those wanting to learn more about NetBSD's NVMM hypervisor can do so via the NetBSD blog.