[ANNOUNCE] KVM Microconference at LPC 2023

[Mickaël Salaün]

Hi,

What is the status of this microconference proposal? We'd be happy to 
talk about Heki [1] and potentially other hypervisor supports.

Regards,
  Mickaël


[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230505152046.6575-1-mic@digikod.net/


On 26/05/2023 18:09, Mickaël Salaün wrote:
> See James Morris's proposal here:
> https://lore.kernel.org/all/17f62cb1-a5de-2020-2041-359b8e96b8c0@linux.microsoft.com/
> 
> On 26/05/2023 04:36, James Morris wrote:
>   > [Side topic]
>   >
>   > Would folks be interested in a Linux Plumbers Conference MC on this
>   > topic generally, across different hypervisors, VMMs, and architectures?
>   >
>   > If so, please let me know who the key folk would be and we can try
> writing
>   > up an MC proposal.
> 
> The fine-grain memory management proposal from James Gowans looks
> interesting, especially the "side-car" virtual machines:
> https://lore.kernel.org/all/88db2d9cb42e471692ff1feb0b9ca855906a9d95.camel@amazon.com/
> 
> 
> On 09/05/2023 11:55, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> Hi all!
>>
>> We are planning on submitting a CFP to host a KVM Microconference at
>> Linux Plumbers Conference 2023. To help justify the proposal, we would
>> like to gather a list of folks that would likely attend, and crowdsource
>> a list of topics to include in the proposal.
>>
>> For both this year and future years, the intent is that a KVM
>> Microconference will complement KVM Forum, *NOT* supplant it. As you
>> probably noticed, KVM Forum is going through a somewhat radical change in
>> how it's organized; the conference is now free and (with some help from
>> Red Hat) organized directly by the KVM and QEMU communities. Despite the
>> unexpected changes and some teething pains, community response to KVM
>> Forum continues to be overwhelmingly positive! KVM Forum will remain
>> the venue of choice for KVM/userspace collaboration, for educational
>> content covering both KVM and userspace, and to discuss new features in
>> QEMU and other userspace projects.
>>
>> At least on the x86 side, however, the success of KVM Forum led us
>> virtualization folks to operate in relative isolation. KVM depends on
>> and impacts multiple subsystems (MM, scheduler, perf) in profound ways,
>> and recently we’ve seen more and more ideas/features that require
>> non-trivial changes outside KVM and buy-in from stakeholders that
>> (typically) do not attend KVM Forum. Linux Plumbers Conference is a
>> natural place to establish such collaboration within the kernel.
>>
>> Therefore, the aim of the KVM Microconference will be:
>> * to provide a setting in which to discuss KVM and kernel internals
>> * to increase collaboration and reduce friction with other subsystems
>> * to discuss system virtualization issues that require coordination with
>> other subsystems (such as VFIO, or guest support in arch/)
>>
>> Below is a rough draft of the planned CFP submission.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Paolo Bonzini (KVM Maintainer)
>> Sean Christopherson (KVM x86 Co-Maintainer)
>> Marc Zyngier (KVM ARM Co-Maintainer)
>>
>>
>> ===================
>> KVM Microconference
>> ===================
>>
>> KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) enables the use of hardware features
>> to improve the efficiency, performance, and security of virtual machines
>> created and managed by userspace.  KVM was originally developed to host
>> and accelerate "full" virtual machines running a traditional kernel and
>> operating system, but has long since expanded to cover a wide array of use
>> cases, e.g. hosting real time workloads, sandboxing untrusted workloads,
>> deprivileging third party code, reducing the trusted computed base of
>> security sensitive workloads, etc.  As KVM's use cases have grown, so too
>> have the requirements placed on KVM and the interactions between it and
>> other kernel subsystems.
>>
>> The KVM Microconference will focus on how to evolve KVM and adjacent
>> subsystems in order to satisfy new and upcoming requirements: serving
>> guest memory that cannot be accessed by host userspace[1], providing
>> accurate, feature-rich PMU/perf virtualization in cloud VMs[2], etc.
>>
>>
>> Potential Topics:
>>      - Serving inaccessible/unmappable memory for KVM guests (protected VMs)
>>      - Optimizing mmu_notifiers, e.g. reducing TLB flushes and spurious zapping
>>      - Supporting multiple KVM modules (for non-disruptive upgrades)
>>      - Improving and hardening KVM+perf interactions
>>      - Implementing arch-agnostic abstractions in KVM (e.g. MMU)
>>      - Defining KVM requirements for hardware vendors
>>      - Utilizing "fault" injection to increase test coverage of edge cases
>>      - KVM vs VFIO (e.g. memory types, a rather hot topic on the ARM side)
>>
>>
>> Key Attendees:
>>      - Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini at redhat.com> (KVM Maintainer)
>>      - Sean Christopherson <seanjc at google.com>  (KVM x86 Co-Maintainer)
>>      - Your name could be here!
>>
>> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20221202061347.1070246-1-chao.p.peng@linux.intel.com
>> [2] https://lore.kernel.org/all/CALMp9eRBOmwz=mspp0m5Q093K3rMUeAsF3vEL39MGV5Br9wEQQ@mail.gmail.com
>>
>>