NAME

vmm —

SYNOPSIS

vmm0 at mainbus0

DESCRIPTION

The vmm driver implements a virtual machine monitor (VMM) suitable for executing virtual machines (VMs). A VMM runs on the host operating system and provides facilities to execute one or more VMs, each of which is provided with a suitable complement of virtual hardware. These VMs run independently of the host, but may interact with it as any other machine would (e.g. via network communications or other means). VMs are allocated hardware resources by the VMM during creation, including:

• Virtual CPUs
• Virtual network interfaces
• Virtual disk images
• Virtual serial ports

Although VMs execute independently of each other and the host, they do consume host resources and, as such, the number of VMs (and their configurations) should be taken into consideration when planning host capacity. The vmm driver requires suitable host CPU capabilities in order to provide VM services. The vmm driver requires at least one CPU with hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities and nested or extended paging capabilities to be present on the host. For more information, consult the CPU vendor's documentation.

SEE ALSO

cpu(4), intro(4), virtio(4), vmctl(8), vmd(8)

HISTORY

The vmm driver appeared in OpenBSD 5.9.

AUTHORS

Mike Larkin <mlarkin@openbsd.org>