OpenIoT & ELC Europe 2016

kvmtool started out as lean, hacker-friendly alternative to QEMU for driving KVM virtual machines, living in the tools directory of the kernel tree. At ARM it was and is used as an early enablement vehicle for testing new KVM kernel features. Now as the tool has been separated from the kernel tree and lives in its own, independent repository, wider interest has sparked to use it in more production like scenarios , for instance in the hope to use less host resources. The presentation will first give an overview about kvmtool, showing the differences and similarities to QEMU. It also looks at how kvmtool performs in terms of resource usage and what obstacles it still needs to overcome to become more useful.