Notes on Taking KVM-on-KVM Nested Virtualization for a Spin
summary
Tests run on a Haswell Intel box with upstream KVM git and libvirt/qemu show concrete gains: enabling VMCS shadowing cuts VM exits ~45% for CPU-bound work, while enabling nested EPT yields an initial 8–10× speedup on a kernel build (example: L0=8 vCPUs, L1=4, L2=2; a run falls from ~19m to ~8m30s). Configuration requires kvm_intel nested on plus host CPU passthrough; nested support is experimental, some shutdown crashes observed, and IO workloads remain untested.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction
- 6:20New Features
- 10:11Configuration
- 20:36Summary
- 21:31Autotest
- 22:37KVM Git
- 23:09Questions
- 24:44Shadow
- 27:38Testing
related talks
27mEvaluate Implementation Options of KVM-based Type1 (or 1.5) Hypervisor
20mKVM-devirt: Extending KVM to a Zero-Overhead Partition Hypervisor
10mDemo: Nested Virtualization Acceleration
19mKubevirt and the Cost of Containerizing VMs
17mMitigating Excessive Pause-Loop-Exiting in VM-Agnostic KVM
32mA journey through supporting VMs with dedicated CPUs on Kubernetes
50mProtected KVM on Arm64: A Technical Deep Dive
24mHow Hard Could it be to Flip a bit? KVM PV Feature Enablement up the Virtualization Stack