KVM Forum 2018

When virtualization first appeared in hardware platforms it was necessary to use emulation for many parts of the implementation of the virtual machine. However with new virtualization support and the development of paravirtualized devices less of the platform needs to be emulated. The removal of legacy emulation has many benefits including reducing attack surface and reduced binary size.

In this presentation we will describe our effort to produce a legacy free platform using QEMU and the progress so far. We outline the issues we encountered with tightly coupled dependencies, firmware expectations and operating system assumptions and how we go about resolving those. The features required to run Kata Containers, which utilises QEMU functionality not ordinarily used, guides our direction on what our platform needs to look like and acts as one of our validation tools.