Re: Why guest physical addresses are not the same as the corresponding host virtual addresses in QEMU/KVM? Thanks!

No, the guest physical address spaces is not intrinsically tied to the host virtual address spaces. The fact that GPAs and HVAs are related in KVM is a property KVM's architecture. EPT/NPT has absolutely nothing to do with HVAs. As Maxim pointed out, KVM links a guest's physical address space, i.e. GPAs, to the host's virtual address space, i.e. HVAs, via memslots. For all intents and purposes, this is an extra layer of address translation that is purely software defined. The memslots allow KVM to retrieve the HPA for a given GPA when servicing a shadow page fault (a.k.a. EPT violation). When EPT is enabled, a shadow page fault due to an unmapped GPA will look like: GVA -> [guest page tables] -> GPA -> EPT Violation VM-Exit The above walk of the guest page tables is done in hardware. KVM then does the following walks in software to retrieve the desired HPA: GPA -> [memslots] -> HVA -> [host page tables] -> HPA KVM then takes the resulting HPA and shoves it into KVM's shadow page tables, or when TDP is enabled, the EPT/NPT page tables. When the guest is run with TDP enabled, GVA->HPA translations look like the following, with all walks done in hardware. GVA -> [guest page tables] -> GPA -> [extended/nested page tables] -> HPA