Broadcom, which acquired VMware’s business a year ago, has proposed significant changes to the KVM hypervisor to incorporate VMware features into the user space. These changes aim to enable the use of the KVM hypervisor on the Linux platform for VMware products, allowing the launch of unmodified VMware guest systems using KVM. One of the changes involves adding support in KVM for redirecting specific hypercalls for VMware to the user space, eliminating the need for proprietary kernel modules.
Another change introduced by Broadcom enables the inclusion of the VMware Backdoor interface at the hypervisor level for individual virtual machines, in addition to the system-wide activation through a bootable parameter. This enhancement further enhances the compatibility between VMware products and the KVM hypervisor.
According to Michael Larabel at Phoronix, Broadcom has confirmed plans to shift the Linux versions of VMware Workstation to utilize the KVM hypervisor instead of proprietary virtualization. The timeline for this transition is still uncertain and will depend on the integration of necessary changes into the main kernel and their distribution. It is expected that the transition will be smooth as the required patches are minimal, consisting of just a few dozen lines of code. The optimistic projection suggests that VMware Workstation could fully transition to KVM by next year.