Advanced topics in KVM Virtualization (Andrea Arcangeli, RedHat)

Linux as Hypervisor with KVM is the ideal virtualization technology to use in cloud computing environments. In addition to the specific virtualization features (like virtio drivers, vhost-net, migration, shadow MMU, ballooning, hardware support for SR-IOV and all new hardware features) KVM also leverages the efficiency, testing, reliability and improvements of the Linux Kernel. The close integration of the KVM shadow pagetables management with the Linux Virtual Memory subsystem (thanks to the mmu notifier) allows KVM to take advantage of all Virtual Memory kernel features like Transparent Hugepages, KSM, swapping, zram (ram compression) in a fully transparent way. In short with KVM every Linux Kernel performance improvement often translates in an improvement for the guest OS too.