Is it possible to run KVM over a qemu emulated powerpc architecture

Question

I understand that qemu uses binary translation to emulate machines, so irrespective of the underlying architecture, it can provide emulation.
And, KVM uses Hardware Virtualization technique to make this process faster. Thus, KVM requires VT support from underlying architectures (which x86 processor provides).

I have emulated powerpc architecture with qemu over x86 architecture. My question is whether it is possible to run KVM over this powerpc architecture.

Duplicate here? http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4903/how-to-install-kvm-in-debian-lenny-over-powerpc — Jeremy Hajek, Jan 14 '11 at 21:02

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 20 '12 at 01:25

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The ppc970mp supports virtualization, and kvm on a ppc97mp uses it as such.

answered Aug 20 '12 at 01:25

MikeJC

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 20 '10 at 16:08

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KVM uses hardware acceleration. Usually it provides support for emulating only itself (i.e. Intel VT-x emulates Intel processors etc.) and I would be highly surprised it PowerPC provided any emulation of Intel processors (as it would require duplicating Intel functionality in PPC processor largly increasing cost and size of such unit).

However there are planned ports of KVM to PowerPC architecture which would allow to emulate PowerPC systems on PowerPC CPU efficiently.

answered Dec 20 '10 at 16:08

Maciej Piechotka

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Powerpc processors doesn't provide virtualization hardware support. So, KVM porting on powerpc doesn't depend on that support. From http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/PowerPC: "Current development is aimed at running 440 Linux kernels as guests on 440 Linux host. Since the 440 processor does not implement virtualization hardware support, this is done via "trap and emulate" of privileged instructions executed inside the guest. " So, even if qemu doesn't expose virtualization hardware support to the guest virtual machine, I think it is possible to run KVM (only for powerpc) on top of it. – db42 Dec 23 '10 at 09:56
My bad (I'm not specialist on PPC). However technically my answer is not wrong [KVM uses hardware acceleration now and it will allow emulate PPC on PPC efficiently I imagine (just not using hardware acceleration)]. – Maciej Piechotka Dec 24 '10 at 22:38

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 13 '13 at 09:15

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Powerpc has kvm implement. You can see the latest source code of qemu-kvm. There is kvm.c file in powerpc folder.

answered Aug 13 '13 at 09:15

Edward Shen

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Is it possible to run KVM over a qemu emulated powerpc architecture

3 Answers3