I can pretty much guarantee this move was because they want to can all of the people maintaining the proprietary virtualization code. The odds of Broadcom making any significant upstream contributions, beyond the small bit of code they need for workstation to function, is almost 0. I guess you can call it a "win" in that there's one less competing product in the market, but I don't see it boosting KVM functionality or quality in any meaningful way.
Now we just need Oracle to decide not to want to maintain the Virtualbox kernel modules. Seeing as someone already did most of the work of porting it, they don't even need to do a lot of work to make it happen.
If I remember correctly you can already select KVM as the backend in Virtualbox. And in Windows you can use HyperV as your backend. Not sure about MacOS land.
I prefer a bit of competition.
But rather than have multiple companies working on incompatible implementations of the virtual machine monitor component, it's better if possible for them to standardize on a single one. KVM is not a full virtualization solution, after all. Look at this patch: it may very well be all that is needed for VMWare Workstation to use KVM internally. That ought to demonstrate how these kernel modules are effectively interchangeable.
Virtualbox and VMWare will still act and feel the same when they use KVM internally, just like they do on Windows when they use Hyper-V internally, or macOS when they use the Hypervisor framework internally, or like Virtualbox-KVM already does, some networking omissions aside.
The benefits of sticking to KVM are clear. If anyone has a problem in production, fixing it benefits every KVM user. If anyone wants to migrate between virtualization solutions, it's much easier when you can use multiple of them at the same time, whereas today you can't boot any of upstream Virtualbox, VMware, or KVM virtual machines at the same time on Linux.
(edit: And the benefits of not using out-of-tree kernel modules is even clearer; out-of-tree modules taint your kernel, preventing you from reporting bugs upstream, often prevent you from being able to upgrade to the latest kernels, are a pain to deal with when using secure boot, etc.)
KVM and hardware virtualization solutions can be useful for more than just virtualization, too; unlike Vbox and VMware, KVM offers a general interface for using these processor features. For example, there are some cases where it might be useful for Wine.
So personally I think it's fine. KVM is just a foundational part of a virtualization solution, and there's plenty of competition in the overall space.
Plus KVM is GPL right? That means more open source code (albeit spaghetti, given the origin)
https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/broadcom-unloads-vm...
> Boadcom is selling VMware’s End-User Computing (EUC) Division to KKR for $4 billion... This includes its Horizon desktop and application virtualization platform, and Workspace One unified endpoint management platform.
If hyper-V is not enabled, then you’re running on metal.
You may notice a longer than normal reboot time when enabling or disabling Hyper-V compared to a normal reboot, and this is why; you’re moving from running on silicon to running in a privileged management VM or vice versa.
Same applies to XBox Windows flavour.
The problem this introduces is it probably won't work with existing customer tooling built for W/F, won't work with open-vm-tools, and will be incompatible with existing VMs. IOW, this will likely have a net negative impact on users.
Sad.
It might be better now, but it wasn't ready at that point, I'll probably check it out again in a few years time.
The speed for Arm Linux on a MacOS host was OK, but the hard locks I was hitting multiple times a day, not so much.
Could this move require VMWare/BC to release source code that could improve qemu/virt-manager? KVM is GPL if not mistaken.
There’s plenty of closed source software that runs on Linux, VMware workstation included.
context: Broadcom has made Pro free for private users but you still need to register with them to download it.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-developer-abandons-vmwar...
I've been running esxi to host my home infrastructure for many years. But Broadcom took that away.
As such, I've been looking around for a replacement, and if KVM can now support VMWare VMs natively, that will make my migration process a lot simpler.
Or am I missing something important?
