Re: Xen as a guest under KVM on QEMU for Arm64

[Fahad Arslan <fahad.arslan@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Has anyone successfully run Xen as a guest on KVM/QEMU for AArch64 with MMU and EL2 working?

I’d really appreciate any thoughts or input.

Thanks,

Fahad

On Fri, May 30, 2025 at 12:54 PM Fahad Arslan <fahad.arslan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi,

We’re attempting to use nested virtualization (NV2) on an Arm64 platform with ARM’s Virtualization Extensions, using the Linux kernel 6.15-rc7 and Xen. In this setup, Xen is running as a level-1 (L1) guest hypervisor inside a QEMU “virt” machine, which has been modified to support KVM as the host hypervisor (L0).

The issue arises when Xen enables the MMU: its identity-mapped memory region, including the address in TTBR0_EL2, becomes inaccessible. This results in a translation fault when attempting to execute the next instruction, halting further progress.

Has anyone successfully run Xen as a guest under KVM on QEMU for Arm64 with MMU and EL2 functioning correctly?

Thanks,

Fahad