[ANNOUNCE] KVM Microconference at LPC 2023

[Mickaël Salaün]

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
> 
>