[PATCH 0/13] Hypervisor-mode KVM on POWER7

[Alexander Graf]

On 11.05.2011, at 12:34, Paul Mackerras wrote:

> 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.
> 
> These patches are against Ben Herrenschmidt's next branch in his tree
> at git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/benh/powerpc.git.

Very nice patches indeed :). Is there any way I can test them? I don't like pulling code that I couldn't run anywhere yet.


Alex