KVM stands for Kernel-based Virtual Machine. It is an open-source virtualization technology built into the Linux kernel. KVM allows a Linux kernel to function as a hypervisor, which enables it to create and manage virtual machines (VMs).
Key features and capabilities of KVM include:
- Hardware Virtualization Support: KVM utilizes hardware virtualization extensions such as Intel VT-x and AMD-V to achieve efficient virtualization.
- Full Virtualization: It supports running unmodified guest operating systems, such as Windows or other Linux distributions.
- Performance: KVM is known for its good performance, largely due to leveraging hardware virtualization support and direct access to hardware resources.
- Integration with Linux: Being part of the Linux kernel, KVM benefits from tight integration with Linux and its ecosystem.
- Management Interfaces: KVM can be managed through various tools and interfaces, such as libvirt, virt-manager, and command-line tools like virsh.
Overall, KVM is widely used in enterprise environments for server virtualization and cloud computing due to its robustness, performance, and integration with Linux systems.
In this series of blog posts, we will learn about the internals of KVM codebase, and also learn about how it integrates with other subsystems such as qemu. We will start with learning how to use the KVM APIs.
kvm-hello-world is a perfect example to start with learning about the KVM APIs.
