Broadcom, which acquired VMware's business a year ago, has proposed several changes to be included in the Linux kernel that would add the ability to redirect VMware hypercalls to user space in the KVM hypervisor and provide functionality for selectively enabling the 'VMWare backdoor' interface used in paravirtualization for sending requests from the guest system to the host environment. It is noted that these changes will allow VMware products to shift to using the KVM hypervisor on the Linux platform and enable the running of unmodified VMware guest systems using KVM.
The first change adds support in KVM for redirecting VMware-specific hypercalls to a handler executed in user space (in VMware products, hypercalls are handled in user space), allowing virtual machines created for VMware to run without the need for proprietary kernel modules and without modifications to the virtual machines.
The second change provides the capability to enable the 'VMWare backdoor' interface not only for the entire system through the existing boot parameter kvm.enable_vmware_backdoor, but also through activation at the hypervisor level tied to specific virtual machines.
Michael Larabel received confirmation from Broadcom that Linux versions of VMware Workstation's virtualization platform are intended to transition to using the KVM hypervisor instead of its own proprietary virtualization code. The timeline for the switch to KVM has not been determined yet and depends on how quickly the necessary changes for working with VMware guest machines will be included in the main kernel and made available in distributions. It is anticipated that there will be no issues with integrating the patches, as they do not entail significant changes and consist of only a few dozen lines of code. The most optimistic scenario mentions the transition of VMware Workstation to KVM as early as next year.
Source: opennet.ru
