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VMware Workstation Shifting From Proprietary Code To Using Upstream KVM


This isn't an off-schedule April Fools' Joke or anything like that but an exciting sign of the times: VMware Workstation will be shifting off its proprietary base and onto leveraging the upstream Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) for virtualization needs moving forward.

I know that in general that's frowned upon but VMwre guests send quite a few hypercalls from userspace and it would be both impractical and largelly impossible to handle all in the kernel. Beyond the patch cover letter explicitly mentioning " to be able to switch VMware products running on Linux to KVM", I have been able to confirm directly with Broadcom that this indeed is in motion. In part that transition is going to depend upon how quickly their necessary KVM changes can be upstreamed and in turn picked up by the major Linux distributions.

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