KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine)

KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a virtualization infrastructure for the Linux kernel that turns it into a hypervisor, which was merged into the Linux kernel mainline in February 2007.^[1] KVM requires a processor with hardware virtualization extension.^[2] KVM has also been ported to FreeBSD^[3] and Illumos^[4] in the form of loadable kernel modules.

KVM originally supported x86 processors and has been ported to S/390,^[5] PowerPC,^[6] and IA-64. An ARM port was merged during the 3.9 kernel merge window.^[7]

A wide variety of guest operating systems work with KVM, including many flavours and versions of Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, Haiku, ReactOS, Plan 9, AROS Research Operating System^[8] and OS X.^[9] In addition, Android 2.2, GNU/Hurd^[10] (Debian K16), Minix 3.1.2a, Solaris 10 U3 and Darwin 8.0.1, together with other operating systems and some newer versions of these listed, are known to work with certain limitations.^[11]

Paravirtualization support for certain devices is available for Linux, OpenBSD,^[12] FreeBSD,^[13] NetBSD,^[14] Plan 9^[15] and Windows guests using the VirtIO^[16] API. This supports a paravirtual Ethernet card, a paravirtual disk I/O controller,^[17] a balloon device for adjusting guest memory usage, and a VGA graphics interface using SPICE or VMware drivers.