Avi Kivity is the lead developer and maintainer of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine project, better known as kvm. The project was started in mid-2006, and has been part of the Linux kernel since the 2.6.20 release in February of 2007. kvm is a full virtualization system for x86-based Linux hosts, allowing users to run isolated x86 guest operating systems in virtual machines.
Avi Kivity's Kernel Developer Blog
I/O performance is of great importance to a hypervisor. I/O is also a huge
maintenance burden, due to the large number of hardware devices that need to
be supported, numerous I/O protocols, high availability options, and
management for it all.
VMware opted for the performance option, but putting the I/O stack in the
hypervisor. Unfortunately the VMware kernel is proprietary, so that means
VMware has to write and maintain the entire I/O stack. That means a slow
development rate, and that your hardware may take a while to be supported.
Xen took the maintainability route, by doing all I/O within a Linux guest,
called "domain 0". By reusing Linux for I/O, the Xen maintainers don't have
to write an entire I/O stack. Unfortunately, this eats awa... (more)
Avi Kivity is the lead developer and maintainer of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine project, better known as kvm. The project was started in mid-2006, and has been part of the Linux kernel since the 2.6.20 release in February of 2007. kvm is a full virtualization system for x86-based Linux hosts, allowing users to run isolated x86 guest operating systems in virtual machines.
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