I think the main argument in favor of Xen was that it would have a smaller attack surface for hackers than KVM. After all, Xen is a hypervisor-based solution, whereas with KVM you are running the full Linux kernel plus qemu as your host.
With that being said, there have been exploits in the Xen hypervisor. As more hardware integration gets added, dom0 starts to look a lot more like a traditional kernel.
Personally, I use kvm for all my virtual machines, since I don't want to run everything under dom0.
justincormack
The option to run qemu in stub domains is a big advantage, or not run qemu at all if you use PV.
walterbell
> Personally, I use kvm for all my virtual machines, since I don't want to run everything under dom0
Did you mean Xen?
colin_mccabeOP
kvm doesn't have dom0. More generally, you can run kvm on an unmodified SuSE (or other Linux distribution) kernel.
kasabali
AFAIK xen is also in upstream kernel and there should be no difference in this regard.
With that being said, there have been exploits in the Xen hypervisor. As more hardware integration gets added, dom0 starts to look a lot more like a traditional kernel.
Personally, I use kvm for all my virtual machines, since I don't want to run everything under dom0.