Kernel-based Virtual Machine
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a virtualization infrastructure for the Linux kernel. KVM requires a processor with hardware virtualization extension. KVM has also been ported to FreeBSD and Illumos in the form of loadable kernel modules.
KVM originally supported x86 and x86-64 processors and has been ported to S/390, PowerPC, and IA-64. An ARM port is in progress.
A wide variety of guest operating systems work with KVM, including many flavours of Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, Haiku, ReactOS, Plan 9, and AROS Research Operating System. A modified version of QEMU can use KVM to run Mac OS X.
Paravirtualization support for certain devices is available for Linux, FreeBSD and Windows guests using the VirtIO framework. This supports a paravirtual Ethernet card, a paravirtual disk I/O controller, a balloon device for adjusting guest memory usage, and a VGA graphics interface using SPICE or VMware drivers.
KVM uses SeaBIOS.
Linux 2.6.20 (released February 2007) was the first to include KVM.
Read more about Kernel-based Virtual Machine: Design, Licensing, History, Graphical Management Tools, Emulated Hardware, Implementations
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