The NetBSD team has been working hard on a new user-mode API for our
hypervisor that will be released as part of the upcoming NetBSD 9.0.
The NetBSD team has implemented its new hypervisor called NVMM. It has been
included since NetBSD 9.0 and has been in use now for quite some time. NVMM
adds user-mode capabilities to create and manage virtual machines, configure
memory mappings for guest machines, and create and control execution of
virtual processors.
With this new API we are now able to bring our hypervisor to the QEMU
community! The following patches implement the NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor
accelerator (NVMM) for QEMU on NetBSD 9.0 and newer hosts.
When compiling QEMU for x86_64 it will autodetect nvmm and will compile the
accelerator for use if found. At runtime using the '-accel nvmm' should see a
significant performance improvement over emulation, much like when using 'hax'
on NetBSD.
The documentation for this new API is visible at https://man.netbsd.org under
the libnvmm(3) and nvmm(4) pages.
NVMM was designed and implemented by Maxime Villard <max@m00nbsd.net>
Thank you for your feedback.