KVM for the Mainframe
kvm-65 was released today. The most interesting feature in this release is support for the s390 architecture, more specifically, the System z9 line of mainframes.
The s390 is the grand-daddy of virtualization. Everything started there. In so many ways, everything we're doing with x86 virtualization is just playing catch-up. The new exciting features like hardware virtualization support and hardware paging support have been in s390 forever.
s390 clearly has a very mature hypervisor. What many people may not know though is that it's normal to run two hypervisors at any given time on s390. At the bottom level, there's PR/SM which divides the machine into rather coarse partitions. Within a PR/SM partition, you can run z/OS or Linux. You can also run z/VM within a PR/SM partition. z/VM is another hypervisor that allows for much more sophisticated features like memory overcommit and processor overcommit. The user has the ability to decide how much hypervisor they need to maximize the efficiency of their workloads.
Within a z/VM partition, you can run z/OS or Linux. The beauty of s390 is that this configuration has been supported in the hardware for many years and is very fast.
When Linux adopted native support for virtualization, it became obvious that this could be easily supported on the s390. The hardware has long supported this sort of nested virtualization and the implementation turned out to be very straight forward. It helps that the x86 virtualization extensions were inspired by a paper written about s370 almost 30 years ago :-)
What do you get from a platform that has supported virtualization for longer than I've been alive? In this very first release of KVM for s390, it already supports 64-way guests. After two years of development, we've just gotten to supporting 16-way guests on x86.
posted by Anthony Liguori at 4:31 PM
6 Comments:
Anthony, could you give the reference to the paper written 37 years ago?
This is really informative content and reading well. I Would like to spread to my friends.
Nice post. we are impressed by the way you produce a clear description of your topic. thanks for the information and keep on posting thank you
I feel your blog really useful and inspiring me. I am searching KVM for my mainframe, here i found appropriate knowledge for me.
Phone Sex
Well done! I am grateful that you have shared this important post with me. Thanks! I am sure people must have got impressed with this post!
really an informative one it was very helpful to me and iam sure it will be a great post to all who read this. Nice information, valuable and excellent design with good ideas and concepts . Cheers for the good one .This amazing Traffic post is one of The best and unique among all
Post a Comment
<< Home