| PackageDescription | Full virtualization on i386 and amd64 hardware
Using KVM, one can run multiple virtual PCs, each running unmodified Linux or
Windows images. Each virtual machine has private virtualized hardware: a
network card, disk, graphics adapter, etc.
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KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for
Linux hosts on x86 (32 and 64-bit) hardware.
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KVM is intended for systems where the processor has hardware support for
virtualization, see below for details. All combinations of 32-bit and 64-bit
host and guest systems are supported, except 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts.
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KVM requires your system to support hardware virtualization, provided by AMD's
SVM capability or Intel's VT. To find out if your processor has the necessary
support, do as follows:
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* Make sure you run Linux 2.6.16 or newer for AMD processors, or
Linux 2.6.15 for Intel processors. Older Linux versions do not report
the virtualization capabilities.
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* Run this command in a shell: egrep '^flags.*(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo
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If it prints anything, the processor provides hardware virtualization
support and is suitable for use with KVM.
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Without hardware support, you can use qemu instead, possibly with the kqemu
package for better performance.
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The recommended qemu package contains the script
/usr/sbin/qemu-make-debian-root, which uses debootstrap to build a Debian disk
image. See the man page for qemu-make-debian-root. The suggested hal package
is only used for automatically reporting the system bios version and computer
model when reporting bugs.
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KVM consists of two loadable kernel modules (kvm.ko and either kvm-amd.ko or
kvm-intel.ko) and a userspace component. This package contains the userspace
component, and you can get the kernel modules from the standard kernel images
or build them yourself from the kvm-source package which provides the module
source. |