Does Graviton 3 support nested virtualization?

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Hi,

I tried to run a KVM based VM on a Graviton EC2 instance. However I couldn't see /dev/kvm on a c7g.xlarge instance. I confirmed the VM works on a a1.metal which is a bit costly I feel. So I'd like to know Graviton 3 (or future Graviton) has support of nested virtualization added in Armv8.3-A (https://developer.arm.com/documentation/102142/0100/Nested-virtualization).

Regards, Soju

soju
asked 9 months ago463 views
4 Answers
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Only bare metal[1,2] EC2 instances provide direct access to cpu of the underlying server and its' features like Intel VT-x required to run your own hypervisor. The other types of instances does not expose the hardware requirements to install and run another virtualization layer on top of an EC2 instance which itself is a virtual machine.

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EXPERT
answered 9 months ago
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Thank you for answering this.

If my understanding is correct, ARMv8.3 or above has a support of nested virtualization in architecture level while Intel requires optional CPU feature, VT-x. It sounds to me that the answer of a post below implies nested virtualization would be available once Graviton has ARMv8.3 or above architecture. These are why I had a hope of running VM on a non-metal Graviton instance. Nested virtualization on Graviton, https://repost.aws/questions/QUEoabj2ZERq2P5QFL6d6-RQ/nested-virtualization-on-graviton

soju
answered 8 months ago
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The answer is no, EC2 VMs do not support nested virtualization for any architecture. To run your own hypervisor on EC2, you have to use *.metal instances. From there you could do nested virtualization, but at that point there's no need as you have the entire machine to work with.

GeoffB
answered 8 months ago
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Thank you for clarifying the conclusion. We have a concrete reason to need nested VMs running on EC2. Hopefully AWS will continue to provide a1.metal for a long time as it's relatively reasonable price among all metal instances.

soju
answered 7 months ago

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