On Tue, 2007-06-19 at 01:44 +1000, Paul J R wrote: > I have a question which is probably going to sound a little silly, but > what do the kernel modules actually do? >
You were running pure QEMU at that point. QEMU emulates everything including the CPU. This means every instruction in the guest is decoded by a soft-emulation of the x86. KVM builds upon QEMU by replacing the cpu-emulator potion of the code with a facility that utilizes VT/SVM hardware. So instead of emulating instructions, the CPU context-switches into guest mode and allows the guest to run at full speed on the x86 hardware until something happens that requires the system to context switch back to the host. This translates into a much faster guest, though this may only be evident if you run some benchmarks that measure CPU performance. HTH -Greg ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ kvm-devel mailing list kvm-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/kvm-devel
