i've dabbled with QEMU and KVM but never sat down and taken a hard look at them, and now i'm a bit confused about how they fit together, so i'm going to ask a really simple question or two which might clear everything up. based on what i've read over the last few hours, it appears that QEMU is quite happy virtualizing stuff with no actual need for KVM. instead, KVM simply allows QEMU to take advantage of H/W virtualization (intel's VT, amd's AMD-V) for *much* improved performance by giving QEMU access to the additional virtualization-related paging features of the hardware. is that about right? that *sounds* like what's happening as you can read here: http://wiki.qemu.org/KVM "KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) is a Linux kernel module that allows a user space program to utilize the hardware virtualization features of various processors. Today, it supports recent Intel and AMD processors (x86 and x86_64), PPC 440, PPC 970, and S/390 processors. "QEMU can make use of KVM when running a target architecture that is the same as the host architecture. For instance, when running qemu-system-x86 on an x86 compatible processor, you can take advantage of the KVM acceleration - giving you benefit for your host and your guest system." note the use of phrases like "can make use of" and "take advantage of", suggesting that KVM is great to have, but not *required* for running QEMU. in addition, check out some of the command-line options for "qemu" $ qemu-system-x86_64 -h ... snip ... -enable-kvm ... -no-kvm -no-kvm-irqchip -no-kvm-pit ... and so on, clearly suggesting that you can start any of the appropriate QEMU commands while *explicitly* disabling some or all of KVM support. is my understanding correct? is there a decent writeup of this online somewhere, clarifying this distinction? thanks. rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday ========================================================================