Paravirtualization is dead

Well, not all paravirtualization. I/O device virtualization is certainly the best way to get good I/O performance out of virtual machines, and paravirtualized clocks are still necessary to avoid clock-drift issues.

But mmu paravirtualization, hacking your guest operating system's memory management to cooperate with the hypervisor, is going away. The combination of hardware paging (NPT/EPT) and large pages match or beat paravirtualization on most workloads. Talking to a hypervisor is simply more expensive than letting the hardware handle everything transparently, even before taking into account the costs introduced by paravirtualization, like slower system calls.

The design of the kvm paravirtualized mmu reflects this planned obsolescence. Instead of an all or nothing approach, kvm paravirtualization is divided into a set of features which can be enabled or disabled independently. The guest picks the features it supports and starts using them.

The trick is that when the host supports NPT or EPT, kvm does not expose the paravirtualized mmu to the guest; in turn the guest doesn't use these features, and receives the benefit of the more powerful hardware. All this is done transparently without any user intervention.