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Enabling Hyper-V enlightenments with KVM
Windows has support for several paravirt features that it will use when running on Hyper-V, Microsoft's hypervisor. These features are called enlightenments. Many of the features are similar to paravirt functionality that exists with Linux on KVM (virtio, kvmclock, PV EOI, etc.)
Nowadays QEMU/KVM can also enable support for several Hyper-V enlightenments. When enabled, Windows VMs running on KVM will use many of the same paravirt optimizations they would use when running on Hyper-V. For detailed info, see Vadim's presentation from KVM Forum 2012.
From the QEMU/KVM developers, the recommended configuration is:
'' -cpu ...,hv_relaxed,hv_spinlocks=0x1fff,hv_vapic,hv_time ''
Which maps to the libvirt XML:
'' <features> <hyperv> <relaxed state='on'/> <vapic state='on'/> <spinlocks state='on' retries='8191'/> </hyperv> <features/> <clock ...> <timer name='hypervclock' present='yes'/> </clock> ''
Some details about the individual features:
- relaxed/hv_relaxed. Available in libvirt 1.0.0+ (commit) and qemu 1.1+ (commit). This bit disables a Windows sanity check that commonly results in a BSOD when the VM is running on a heavily loaded host (example bugs here, here, and here). Sounds similar to the Linux kernel option no_timer_check, which is automatically enabled when Linux is running on KVM.
It should be safe to enable these bits for all Windows VM, though only Vista/Server 2008 and later will actually make use of the features.
(In fact, Linux also has support for using these Hyper-V features, like the paravirt device drivers and hyperv_clocksource. Though these are really only for running Linux on top of Hyper-V. With Linux on KVM, the natively developed paravirt extensions are understandably preferred).
The next version of virt-manager will enable Hyper-V enlightenments when creating a Windows VM (git commit). virt-xml can also be used to enable these bits easily from the command line for an existing VM:
'' sudo virt-xml $VMNAME --edit --features hyperv_relaxed=on,hyperv_vapic=on,hyperv_spinlocks=on,hyperv_spinlocks_retries=8191 sudo virt-xml $VMNAME --edit --clock hypervclock_present=yes ''
The first invocation will work with virt-manager 1.0.1, the second invocation requires virt-manager.git. In my testing this didn't upset my existing Windows VMs and they worked fine after a reboot.
Other tools aren't enabling these features yet, though there are bugs tracking this for the big ones:
- gnome-boxes: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=732811
(edit 2014-09-08: This change was released in virt-manager-1.1.0)