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Using KVM, one can run multiple virtual PCs, each running unmodified Linux or Windows images. Each virtual machine has private virtualized hardware: a network card, disk, graphics adapter, etc.

KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux hosts on x86 (32 and 64-bit) hardware.

KVM is intended for systems where the processor has hardware support for virtualization, see below for details. All combinations of 32-bit and 64-bit host and guest systems are supported, except 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts.

KVM requires your system to support hardware virtualization, provided by AMD's SVM capability or Intel's VT. To find out if your processor has the necessary support, do as follows:

* Make sure you run Linux 2.6.16 or newer for AMD processors, or Linux 2.6.15 for Intel processors. Older Linux versions do not report the virtualization capabilities.

* Run this command in a shell: egrep '^flags.*(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo

If it prints anything, the processor provides hardware virtualization support and is suitable for use with KVM.

Without hardware support, you can use qemu instead, possibly with the kqemu package for better performance.

The recommended qemu package contains the script /usr/sbin/qemu-make-debian-root, which uses debootstrap to build a Debian disk image. See the man page for qemu-make-debian-root. The suggested hal package is only used for automatically reporting the system bios version and computer model when reporting bugs.

KVM consists of two loadable kernel modules (kvm.ko and either kvm-amd.ko or kvm-intel.ko) and a userspace component. This package contains the userspace component, and you can get the kernel modules from the standard kernel images or build them yourself from the kvm-source package which provides the module source.