As part of the Google Summer of Code 2024 project, the Haiku operating system has made significant progress in virtualization. Thanks to the work of the developer pseudonym dalme, QEMU on Haiku now supports hardware acceleration.
The project was aimed at porting the NVMM hypervisor from DragonFlyBSD to Haiku. This allows QEMU to utilize CPU virtualization hardware extensions, such as Intel VT-x, potentially providing performance of virtual machines, close to native.
Key achievements of the project include:
- Porting the NVMM frontend and VMX backend to Haiku
- Adding support for Extended Page Tables (EPT) in the Haiku kernel
- Adapting QEMU to work with NVMM on Haiku
Although the implementation is not yet complete, the initial tests show promising results. Simple operating systems and bootloaders can now run with hardware acceleration on Haiku. However, more complex systems, such as Haiku itself or Xubuntu, are still not operational.
The developer notes a significant performance improvement on actual hardware after fixing an issue related to EPT, although some stability issues still remain. Multiprocessing support is also in development, with QEMU currently crashing when SMP is enabled.
This project represents an important step in enhancing the virtualization capabilities of Haiku. As the remaining issues are resolved, Haiku users can expect significantly improved performance when running virtual machines through QEMU.
The project's code is available on GitHub, but it has not yet been integrated into the main Haiku codebase.
Source: linux.org.ru
