Execution flow of vCPU

Finally, we are into the vCPU execution flow, which helps us put everything together and understand what happens under the hood.

I hope you didn't forget that the QEMU creates a POSIX thread for a vCPU of the guest and ioctl(), which is responsible for running a CPU and has KVM_RUN arg (#define KVM_RUN _IO(KVMIO, 0x80)). The vCPU thread executes ioctl(.., KVM_RUN, ...) to run the guest code. As these are POSIX threads, the Linux kernel can schedule these threads as with any other process/thread in the system.

Let's see how it all works:

Qemu-kvm User Space:
kvm_init_vcpu ()
    kvm_arch_init_vcpu()
       qemu_init_vcpu()
          qemu_kvm_start_vcpu()
             qemu_kvm_cpu_thread_fn()
    while (1) {
        ...