[ILUG] To ubuntu or not to ubuntu

[Nick Murtagh]

Pádraig Brady wrote:
> Hmm according to to my first link, KVM paravirt
> works on any hardware, but according to the following
> support for older hardware is still to be added:
> http://kerneltrap.org/node/7545#comment-207053

I think paravirtualistion refers to the ability to speed up the system
when using a modified guest, as opposed to full virtualistion which uses
an unmodified guest. KVM will provide both by the looks of things.

Full virtualistion needs hardware support, paravirtualistion doesn't (as
implemented in Xen). However paravirtualistion in KVM can use hardware
support (Ingo: "support for the hardware cr3-cache feature of Intel-VMX
CPUs") which presumably makes it faster than Xen's implementation of
paravirtualistion.

Summary: if you want to use an unmodified guest (eg Windows) KVM is the
only (Linux-kernel) game in town. And by the looks of things it will
eventually eclipse Xen on the paravirtualisation front too since it is
now the blessed Linux kernel virtualisation implementation...

Phew!