[PATCH 0/17] Hypervisor-mode KVM on POWER7 and PPC970

[Alexander Graf]

On 29.06.2011, at 12:15, Paul Mackerras wrote:

> The first patch of the following series is a pure bug-fix for 32-bit
> kernels.
> 
> The remainder of the following series of patches enable KVM to exploit
> the hardware hypervisor mode on 64-bit Power ISA Book3S machines.  At
> present, POWER7 and PPC970 processors are supported.  (Note that the
> PPC970 processors in Apple G5 machines don't have a usable hypervisor
> mode and are not supported by these patches.)
> 
> 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 the master branch of the kvm tree.

Something seems to be broken with signals. When running without io-thread, I can't even do ctrl-c on -nographic while the guest is in sleep mode. But that might not be related to your patches.

I've applied 01-16 now. Sending them through some more testing and if they're good, sending a pull request.


Alex