The following series of patches enable KVM to exploit the hardware hypervisor mode on 64-bit Power ISA Book3S machines. At present only POWER7 is supported, but it would be easy to add other processors. Running the KVM host in hypervisor mode means that the guest can use both supervisor mode and user mode. That means that the guest can execute supervisor-privilege instructions and access supervisor- privilege registers. In addition the hardware directs most exceptions to the guest. Thus we don't need to emulate any instructions in the host. Generally, the only times we need to exit the guest are when it does a hypercall or when an external interrupt or host timer (decrementer) interrupt occurs. The focus of this KVM implementation is to run guests that use the PAPR (Power Architecture Platform Requirements) paravirtualization interface, which is the interface supplied by PowerVM on IBM pSeries machines. Currently the "pseries" machine type in qemu is only supported by book3s_hv KVM, and book3s_hv KVM only supports the "pseries" machine type. That will hopefully change in future. These patches are against Linus' v3.0-rc1 tree. Paul. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
