KVM Forum 2018: Full Schedule

October 24-26, 2018 - Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Click Here For Information & Registration

08:00 BST

Registration

Wednesday October 24, 2018 08:00 - 17:30 BST
Strathblane Hall

Breaks & Registration

10:45 BST

Coffee Break

Wednesday October 24, 2018 10:45 - 11:15 BST
Strathblane Foyer

Breaks & Registration

11:15 BST

L1TF and KVM - Alexander Graf, SUSE

Recently a new speculative execution side channel was unvealed, which
could potentially result in leakage of arbitrary memory contents into
unprivileged virtual machines on most recent Intel CPUs. This
presentation will give insights as to what the L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF)
Spectre vulnerability is. It will show how it can be exploited and based
on that knowledge it will take a look at how KVM mitigates those
issues. It will also show performance penalties these mitigations incur.

On top of that, the presentation will present an alternative work in
progress approach to mitigate L1TF that may recover some of the
performance penalties by leveraging unrelated CPU features.

Speakers

Alexander Graf

Principal Software Engineer, SUSE :)

Alexander started working for SUSE about 10 years ago. Since then he worked on fancy things like SUSE Studio, QEMU, KVM, openSUSE and SLES on ARM and U-Boot. Whenever something really useful comes to his mind, he tends to implement it. Among others he did Mac OS X virtualization using... Read More →

Wednesday October 24, 2018 11:15 - 11:55 BST
Lowther Suite

OSS - KVM Forum Track

12:05 BST

Security in QEMU: How Virtual Machines Provide Isolation - Stefan Hajnoczi, Red Hat

Is it safe to use QEMU to do X? This talk explains the security model and use cases that QEMU is designed for.

Understanding the security model is critical for deploying virtual machines as well as contributing code to QEMU. This talk gives an overview of the attack surfaces, including emulated devices, the monitor, remote desktop, disk images, and the CPU accelerators.

Virtual machines offer isolation from each other and the host if QEMU is configured properly. Most of these best practices are encapsulated in libvirt, but not all users choose to use it, so it is worth understanding them.

Finally, no discussion of security in QEMU would be complete without reviewing CVEs and the lessons learnt from them.

Speakers

Stefan Hajnoczi

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Stefan works on QEMU and Linux in Red Hat's Virtualization team with a focus on storage, VIRTIO, and tracing. Recent projects include libblkio, virtiofs, storage performance optimization for NVMe drives, and out-of-process device emulation. Stefan has been active in the QEMU community... Read More →

Wednesday October 24, 2018 12:05 - 12:45 BST
Lowther Suite

OSS - KVM Forum Track

12:45 BST

Lunch (Attendees on Own)

Wednesday October 24, 2018 12:45 - 14:15 BST
TBA

Breaks & Registration

14:15 BST

Painting a Picture of the KVM Use-cases in the Container World - Fabian Deutsch, Red Hat

KVM is a hypervisor offering strong hardware isolation of a guest from it's hosts.

Containers are now a new software based isolation mechanism for workloads, and it might be a small surprise to see that KVM is surfacing in this context quite often.

In this talk we'll look at how KVM is used on the containers and Kubernetes context.
Specifically we'll be looking at the projects KubeVirt, Katacontainers, gVisor, and virtlet, to understand how KVM is used by them to support certain use-cases.

Speakers

Fabian Deutsch

Engineering Manager, Red Hat

Fabian Deutsch is working for Red Hat and has been working in the virtualization space for the last couple of years. Initially covering some node level aspects in oVirt and now building a robust virtual machine add-on for Kubernetes with KubeVirt. Throughout the years he spoke at... Read More →

kvm and containers kvm forum 2018 pdf

Wednesday October 24, 2018 14:15 - 14:55 BST
Lowther Suite

OSS - KVM Forum Track

15:05 BST

Getting Some Peace and Quiet as an Open Source Maintainer - Cornelia Huck, Red Hat

So you came for the glory of being listed as a maintainer, only to discover that work is continuing to pile up, random people are bothering you on mailing lists, and users are asking for help to actually use your code?

Fear not, this talk is here to help. It will explore some strategies for handling contributions and discussions that leave you breathing space while still encouraging people to do more good work. After all, a burned out maintainer is bad news for everyone.

Speakers

Cornelia Huck

Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

Cornelia is a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, working mainly on virtualization and s390x related topics in QEMU and the Linux kernel. She has been acting as a maintainer for s390x virtualization topics in QEMU and the Linux kernel for several years.Previously, she has given talks... Read More →

Wednesday October 24, 2018 15:05 - 15:45 BST
Lowther Suite

OSS - KVM Forum Track

15:45 BST

Coffee Break

Wednesday October 24, 2018 15:45 - 16:15 BST
Strathblane Foyer

Breaks & Registration

16:15 BST

Memory Overcommit for Overcommitted Admins - Jonathan Davies, Nutanix

Overcommitting memory is a useful tool for increasing VM density but typically comes with a increased administration cost as either a) "safe" memory limits need to configured for each VM; or b) unexpected performance problems need to be identified and addressed.

An automatic and lightweight method for determining a VMs working set is described with suggestions on how this could be used in clustered and non-clustered environments to increase VM density with less of an administrative burden.

The presentation also includes a look at the simple model of Linux's paging subsystem that was used to rapidly prototype and evaluate the method's behaviour with different workloads.

Speakers

Jonathan Davies

Software Engineer, Nutanix

Jonathan is a software engineer working on Nutanix's Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV). He specialises in performance engineering.Jonathan has worked in virtualization for over 10 years and was previously System Architect for XenServer at Citrix.Jonathan holds a PhD in Computer Science... Read More →

Wednesday October 24, 2018 16:15 - 16:55 BST
Lowther Suite

OSS - KVM Forum Track

17:05 BST

Scalability and Stability of libvirt: Experiences with Very Large Hosts - Marc Hartmayer, IBM

With huge servers like IBM z there are many resources available so it was quite obvious to test the limits of libvirt. For example, one of the questions was how fast and how many minimal guests could be started in a short time period. How high is the system load for that? In times of CI and TDD this is especially interesting since thousands of guests are started and destroyed for regression tests.

This presentation will give an overview of bottlenecks in libvirt, what the reasons are and what problems came up during these tests.

Speakers

Marc Hartmayer

Software Engineer - Linux on Z & Virtualization Development, IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH

Employer: IBM Working on: libvirt, s390-tools and QEMU

scalability and stability of libvirt pdf

Wednesday October 24, 2018 17:05 - 17:45 BST
Lowther Suite

OSS - KVM Forum Track

08:00 BST

Registration

Thursday October 25, 2018 08:00 - 17:30 BST
Strathblane Hall

Breaks & Registration

09:00 BST

Keynote: KVM Status Report - Paolo Bonzini, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Speakers

Paolo Bonzini

Distinguished Engineer, Red Hat, Inc.

Paolo is a Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat and the upstream maintainer for both KVM and various subsystems in QEMU. As a contributor to QEMU, through the years, he has worked on various parts of the project architecture, including the threading architecture, the test frameworks... Read More →

Thursday October 25, 2018 09:00 - 09:15 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

Keynote

09:15 BST

Private vs. Common: Reflection on Cross-architecture Commonality - Christian Borntraeger, IBM

While starting out as an x86 hypervisor, the KVM module supports a variety of architectures. Over time a split between common code and per-architecture code has evolved. This talk will reflect on history, current state and potential future improvement regarding commonality.

Speakers

Christian Borntraeger

CPO Linux on IBM Z Development, IBM

Christian Borntraegercrossarch pdf

Thursday October 25, 2018 09:15 - 09:45 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

09:45 BST

Contributor Q&A Panel - Moderated by Stefan Hajnoczi, Red Hat

A technical Q&A panel discussion ranging on various KVM and QEMU-related topics. The discussion will be for about an hour. Topics will be chosen on the spot from a prepared list. And audience (live or remote) can add questions in the live Etherpad during the discussion.

Speakers

Christian Borntraeger

CPO Linux on IBM Z Development, IBM

Peter Feiner

Software Engineer, Google

Peter has worked on virtualization at Google since 2014, focusing on memory management, performance and scaling.

Stefan Hajnoczi

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Cornelia Huck

Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

Wanpeng Li

Linux Kernel Contributor, Tencent Cloud

Wanpeng Li is a 9 years experienced Linux kernel/virtualization developer who works in Tencent Cloud currently. He mainly focuses on KVM, scheduler and memory management. In KVM, he contributes a lot of features to improve performance and stability. He has worked in the IBM LTC kernel... Read More →

Peter Maydell

Principal Software Engineer, Peter Maydell

Peter works for Arm, but has been seconded into Linaro for the last ten years to handle all things Arm in QEMU, including CPU architecture emulation, support for KVM virtualization on Arm servers, and herding an ever-increasing number of board, SoC and device models. He also didn't... Read More →

Thursday October 25, 2018 09:45 - 10:30 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

10:30 BST

Coffee Break

Thursday October 25, 2018 10:30 - 11:00 BST
Strathblane Foyer

Breaks & Registration

11:00 BST

Intel SGX Virtualization on Linux and KVM - Sean Christopherson, Intel

Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) provides new hardware-based capabilities to software developers to protect an application's secrets. SGX allows for the creation of a trusted environment without drawing any dependencies on the integrity of code elsewhere in the software stack, which in modern cloud environments may be millions of lines of code across the application, kernel and VMM.

This talk will provide a brief overview of SGX and its (nefarious) history with respect to Linux, followed by an in-depth analysis of the design and status of SGX virtualization support in KVM.

Speakers

Sean Christopherson

Software Engineer, Google

Sean is an engineer at Google Cloud focused on KVM, and is an upstream co-maintainer for x86 KVM.

KVM Forum 2018 Intel SGX pdf

Thursday October 25, 2018 11:00 - 11:30 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

11:00 BST

Secure Virtual Machines on Power - Ram Pai & Guerney Hunt, IBM

Virtual-machines (VMs) on cloud platform are vulnerable to attacks from sources ranging from other virtual machines, compromised hypervisor to malicious cloud administrator. Securing these VMs requires specialized hardware and software features. Multiple vendors have proposed innovative features to support this need.

Ram and Guerney present the Power9 architectural features that enable a new opensource firmware entity called the Ultravisor. Togather these two components enable the KVM Hypervisor to support a new class of VMs called Secure Virtual Machines (SVMs). This presentation describes the Ultravisor interfaces, the enhancements to KVM and other opensource software entities in the ecosystem.

Speakers

Guerney Hunt

Research Staff Member, IBM

Dr. Guerney D. H. Hunt has been a Research Staff Member at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center since 1995. He is currently working on transferring security technology into IBM products, and developing additional security technology. He participated in a team funded by the Department... Read More →

Ram Pai

Software Development Lead, IBM

Ram Pai is a Linux kernel developer since 2001. He works for IBM's Linux Technology Center in Hillboro Oregon. He has enabled the VFS Shared-Subtree and POWER memory-key feature to the Linux Kernel. He has also contributed to enable SRIOV, the page cache readahead algorithm, tools... Read More →

SVM Edinburg v3 pdf

Thursday October 25, 2018 11:00 - 11:30 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

11:30 BST

Protect Data of Virtual Machines with Memory Encryption on KVM - Kai Huang, Intel Corporation

Today cloud data protection is a critical requirement, and it will be even more important in the future as we have more in-depth and sensitive data in the cloud for new types of workloads (such as IoT and machine learning). Since VM is the key container of such data, it is crucial to protect VM at-rest (as in storage), in-transit (as in network), and during execution. Encryption is considered as the foundation technology for VM protection, and there are established encryption technologies for VMs at-rest and in-transit. Intel® Multi-Key Total Memory Encryption (MKTME) is Intel's new memory encryption technology which supports VM memory encryption to complete VM protection in VM's entire lifecycle. In this presentation we give an introduction to Intel® MKTME, from background, to its hardware architecture, typical use cases in cloud, and our enabling work on Linux/KVM.

Speakers

Kai Huang

Software Engineer, Intel Corporation

Software engineer working on Linux/KVM enabling for Intel's latest virtualization technologies.

mktme kvm forum 2018 pdf

Thursday October 25, 2018 11:30 - 12:00 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

11:30 BST

s390 KVM Memory Management and its Pitfalls - Janosch Frank, IBM

Due to the history of the s390 architecture, many ways of memory management have been introduced to the platform over the years and are still available today. Numerous optimizations for guests increased speed and efficiency, but also added to the complexity that KVM now has to handle when running a guest.

This talk will give an introduction on how KVM memory management for guests is handled on s390, how the optimizations work and what makes adding huge page backing support difficult.

Speakers

Janosch Frank

Software Engineer, IBM

Janosch is a software engineer at IBM Germany and a s390 co-maintainer for KVM. He works on guest memory management, Protected Virtualization and KVM testing.

KVM Forum 2018 s390 KVM memory management pdf

Thursday October 25, 2018 11:30 - 12:00 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

12:00 BST

Extending Secure Encrypted Virtualization with SEV-ES - Thomas Lendacky, AMD

AMD has enhanced the capabilities of its hardware-based memory encryption to further extend the security protections provided by Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). This talk will focus on the Encrypted State (ES) technology which extends the SEV support to minimize exposure of the guest register state for added isolation and protection from the hypervisor. The presentation will discuss the technical details of this technology with a focus on how it is being integrated into KVM.

Speakers

Thomas Lendacky

PMTS Software System Design Engineer, AMD

Tom Lendacky is a member of the Linux OS group at Advanced Micro Devices where he is responsible for enabling and enhancing support for AMD processor features in the Linux kernel. He is currently working on extending the SEV support in the Linux kernel to further enhance the features... Read More →

Thursday October 25, 2018 12:00 - 12:30 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

12:00 BST

vfio-ap: The Perils of the Weird - Halil Pasic, IBM

Pass-through of AP crypto adapters is an ongoing effort spanning KVM, QEMU, and Libvirt. Patches are under discussion. The problem at hand is unique due to the properties of the virtualization facilities provided by the platform. We use vfio-mdev to partition not a single device, but a set of devices. Another peculiarity is that individual cards can be partitioned, but not individually. The cards are partitioned into domains, which are independent from a functional perspective, but span all cards from an access-control perspective.

We have a family of drivers for the different card types on the ap bus. From a pass-through perspective these cards can be treated uniformly, so we ended up adding another driver to the ap bus. Consequently, we had to resolve a set of unique problems, such as how to bind the resources to the right driver and how to react when resources are unbound.

Speakers

Halil Pasic

Software Enigneer, IBM

Halil is working on open source virtualization for IBM Z, with a focus on I/O. This means contributing to QEMU and KVM, while having an eye on integration with the upper management stack (mostly Libvirt).

Thursday October 25, 2018 12:00 - 12:30 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

12:30 BST

Lunch (Attendees on Own)

Thursday October 25, 2018 12:30 - 13:45 BST
TBA

Breaks & Registration

13:45 BST

Performance Optimization on Huawei Public and Private Cloud - Lei Gong & Jinsong Liu, Huawei

With the increasing demand for big data processing and faster memory databases, such as SAP HANA, the demand for large-size virtual machines is getting stronger. Meanwhile, for enterprise virtualization and private cloud scenarios (such as VSI), virtual machine density improvement is also an important means of saving cost, that is, CPU over-commitment.
In this session, we will share some optimization ways in virtualization on the KVM platform for public and/or private cloud. The first one is for the optimization of the spinlock holder of the guest, so that we can improve the synchronization efficiency between the VCPUs of the large-scale virtual machine. The second one is the "balance scheduler", as far as possible to ensure that different VCPUs of the same virtual machine can be scheduled at the same time to improve performance. The last one is optimization of the RTC clock compensation scheme is moved from userspace to kernel to reduce overhead of context switching and increase the density of Windows virtual machines in the private cloud.

Speakers

Lei Gong

HUAWEI

Jinsong Liu

Huawei

Thursday October 25, 2018 13:45 - 14:15 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

13:45 BST

Kata Containers: Leveraging Advanced Features of QEMU to Provide Better Container Isolation - Eric Ernst, Intel

Kata Containers is an open source project that brings the security of hardware virtualization to containers through lightweight VMs. In its effort to look and feel like a container, Kata leverages many of the features in KVM/QEMU which are typically not needed for a cloud virtual machine.

How many developers use VFIO? How many use VFIO-hotplug? And DAX and nvdimm and CPU hotplug?

This session details how Kata Containers use features of KVM/QEMU and some of the problem areas we encountered along the way. Finally, we discuss areas in the hypervisor we’re looking to focus on going forward.

Speakers

Eric Ernst

Senior software engineer, Intel

Eric is a senior software engineer at Intel’s Open Source Technology Center, based out of Portland, Oregon. Eric has spent the last several years working on embedded firmware and the Linux kernel. Eric has been a developer and technical lead for the Intel Clear Containers project... Read More →

Thursday October 25, 2018 13:45 - 14:15 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

14:15 BST

Demand Paging Performance with 160 vCPUs - Cannon Matthews, Google

As physical machine memory sizes and CPU counts rise, so does the demand for large virtual workloads as well. One particular challenge of scaling large VMs is migrating them to new hosts for maintenance. This talk will look at the performance of the demand paging mechanism userfaultfd and how well it performs under stress, in particular how it scales with large number of vCPUs. Then, the talk will examine the guest memory and CPU performance during a demand paging migration of a VM on a 4-socket host with 160 vCPUs, and additionally compare userfaultfd to an alternate approach.

Speakers

Cannon Matthews

Software Engineer, Google

Cannon is a Software Engineer working for Google Cloud on virtualization for Google Compute Engine.

Thursday October 25, 2018 14:15 - 14:45 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

14:15 BST

“Honey, I Shrunk the Hypervisor” - Building a Legacy Free Platform for QEMU - Robert Bradford, Intel Corporation

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.

Speakers

Rob Bradford

Software Engineer, Intel

Rob has worked on Open Source at Intel for over 15 years on a wide variety of projects spanning from client user experiences, to graphics, to system software and now cloud technologies. In the field of cloud technologies Rob has been a key contributor to the Cloud Integrated Advanced... Read More →

Thursday October 25, 2018 14:15 - 14:45 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

14:45 BST

Torwards a More Scalable KVM Hypervisor - Wanpeng Li, Tencent Cloud

Torwards a more scalable KVM hypervisor(Wanpeng Li) - The kvm hypervisor is at the core of cloud computing, Virtual Machine based approaches to workload consolidation, as seen in IaaS cloud as well as datacenter platforms, have long had to contend with performance degradation caused by synchronization primitives inside the guest environments. These primitives can be affected by virtual CPU preemptions by the host scheduler that can introduce delays that are orders of magnitude longer than those primitives were designed for. In this presentation, Wanpeng Li will introduce Paravirtual TLB Shootdown which can mitigate TLB Shootdown Preemption issue. In addition, he will also introduce Exitless IPIs to scale large VMs, and disable mwait/hlt/pause vmexits to improve latency for dedicated instances.

Speakers

Wanpeng Li

Linux Kernel Contributor, Tencent Cloud

Torwards a more Scalable KVM Hypervisor pdf

Thursday October 25, 2018 14:45 - 15:15 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

14:45 BST

Device Assignment with Nested Guests and DPDK - Peter Xu, Red Hat

I/O virtualization is one of the most important aspect of virtualization technology. Generally speaking we can have three types of I/O devices in a virtual machine: emulated, para-virtualized, and device assignment. Here device assignment plays a vital role in performance critical scenarios, which allows a guest to seamlessly manipulate a real hardware device. However it was never safe to run DPDK with such a device before in the guest, and even impossible for nested virtualization due to lack of IO page mapping mechanism. In this presentation, Peter Xu will introduce his work on QEMU/KVM vIOMMU to enable these scenarios. It will contain not only how new users can start using the new feature, but also technical details and challenges on the project.

Speakers

Peter Xu

Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

Peter Xu works for Red Hat virtualization team. He is working on QEMU/KVM project with vIOMMUs, migrations, interrupts and other miscelleneous stuff. He has given a talk in KVM Forum 2016 together with Wei Xu on vhost DMA Remapping.

KVM Forum 2018 viommu vfio pdf

Thursday October 25, 2018 14:45 - 15:15 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

15:15 BST

Coffee Break

Thursday October 25, 2018 15:15 - 15:45 BST
Strathblane Foyer

Breaks & Registration

15:45 BST

CloudAtlas: Ways to Make Live Migration Safe and Expectable - Chao Zhang & Feng Xie, Alibaba Cloud

The public cloud users, especially enterprise users, are increasingly concerned about the stability of the infrastructure provided, therefore the performance impact of the live migration itself can no longer be ignored. In order to perform migration, the following needs to be considered: 1)How to classify the workload and evaluate the performance impact. 2)When should we migrate to reduce the impact to a minimum. 3)How to select params of the migration to balance the resource consumption and migrate speed. The ClouAtlas we build rely on KVM hypervisor to collect data like CPU usage, memory/TLB access and IO. Based on a statistical model and Deep Learning Algorithm, we classify the workload of the VM, and predict proper time to perform migration. After tens of thousands of tests, our system shows an obvious alleviation of the migration impact and a boost of the migration performance.

Speakers

Feng Xie

technical expert, Alibaba Cloud

Feng has been working on virtualization since 2012. He's worked on several areas such as GPU virtualizaton and ARM virtualization. Now Feng is employed by Alibaba Cloud, and is focus on Artificial Intelligence Operation and Maintenance based on Machine Learning.

Chao Zhang

technical expert, Alibaba Cloud

Chao, as a initiated participant of the Live migration team at Alibaba Cloud, has completely witnessed how this technology implanted itself into the Ali-Cloud system along a tough way. Before join Alibaba, Chao is a kernel developer engineer working at Huawei EulerLinux team for... Read More →

Thursday October 25, 2018 15:45 - 16:15 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

15:45 BST

Taking it to the Nest Level - Nested KVM on the POWER9 Processor - Suraj Jitindar Singh, IBM

Nested virtualisation refers to the idea of running a virtual machine within another virtual machine. The new IBM POWER9 PowerPC processor has increased hardware support for nested virtualisation and Suraj has been in the process of developing software support for this feature. In this talk he will delve into the rational behind developing this, the implementation details including the changes involved to KVM and qemu to support this feature, the challenges faced, and finally a discussion about the current state of the project and future work still to be completed. Suraj will also attempt to answer the question on everybody's lips "but how deep can you nest?"

Speakers

Suraj Jitindar Singh

Software Engineer, IBM Australia

Software engineer at IBM where I work on virtualisation for the IBM PowerPC processor architecture. While working in this area for the past 2 and a half years I have made contributions to both the KVM and qemu projects. No previous speaking experience however looking forward to the... Read More →

Thursday October 25, 2018 15:45 - 16:15 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

16:15 BST

Distributed QEMU - Yubin Chen & Zhuocheng Ding, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

It is difficult for a single physical machine to satisfy applications which require massive resources such as big data analysis, while a virtual machine spanning multiple physical nodes can do it. In this presentation, Yubin will demonstrate their work of distributed QEMU which allows a guest OS running on single virtual machine to take advantage of resources (CPU, memory, I/O, etc.) from multiple physical nodes. They extend QEMU to enable forwarding of PIO, MMIO, Interrupts so that vCPUs and I/O devices on different machines can communicate with each other. Furthermore, in order to run a cross-node virtual machine, they also have implemented an RDMA-based distributed shared memory by extending the access control of EPT, which makes it possible for aggregating physical memory transparently. The preliminary experiment shows near-native performance for NUMA-friendly benchmarks on sv6 OS.

Speakers

Yubin Chen

Researcher, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Yubin Chen is a second-year graduate student researcher at School of Software, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research focuses on building distributed system by taking advantage of virtualization. The main topics of interests are QEMU/KVM, containers, and distributed systems... Read More →

Zhuocheng Ding

Researcher, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Zhuocheng Ding is a second-year graduate student researcher at School of Software, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research interests include parallel and high-performance computing, system virtualization, distributed system and system security, and currently focuses on building... Read More →

Thursday October 25, 2018 16:15 - 16:45 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

16:15 BST

"Hybrid" Nesting: KVM on Hyper-V - Vitaly Kuznetsov, Red Hat & Tianyu Lan, Microsoft

This may come as a surprise but it is already possible to run nested KVM inside Hyper-V VMs and this includes several instance types on Azure. Such workloads, however, may not always perform very well. Some limitations come from x86 architecture and conceptual differences between KVM and Hyper-V, other issues could be dealt with within KVM. In this talk we will go through different performance bottlenecks of nested KVM-on-Hyper-V deployments. The presentation will highligh recent developments in the area: Englightened VMCS, Enlightened MSR-Bitmap, stable clocksource and others. We will also try to describe our work in progress and possible future improvements for nested KVM in general and KVM on Hyper-V in particular.

Speakers

Vitaly Kuznetsov

Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Software Engineer

Tianyu Lan

Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft

Tianyu is Senior Software Engineer in COSINE(Core OS & Intelligent Edge) at Microsoft. He focuses on the performance optimization of Linux VMs on Hyper-V. Previously, Tianyu worked on ACPI, power management, KVM and Xen opens source projects at Intel Open source technology center... Read More →

Thursday October 25, 2018 16:15 - 16:45 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

16:45 BST

Adaptive Live Migration - Xiao Guangrong & Yulei Zhang, Tencent Cloud

Pre-copy migration could fail for many cases, e.g, if there are memory intensive workloads in VM. Fortunately, QEMU/KVM gains some features to improve it, however these features require the user need to pre-know the workloads in VM, e.g, enable compression only if the data is compressible and system has enough resource to do compression that is not friendly to the public cloud providers. Post-copy migration improves the situations indeed, however, it suffers some shortcomings, e.g, it is unrecoverable, poor performance, etc.

We will present adaptive live migration which speculates VM's workload from host side then enables pre-copy features and adjusts its parameters dynamically, during live migration, it detects the tendency and try next feature if current tendency shows live migration is impossible to success. Try post-copy if we have used all ways but pre-copy still can not success.

Speakers

Xiao Guangrong

Senior Software Engineer, Tencent Cloud

Xiao Guangrong is a Linux Kernel developer working on Ftrace, MM, Btrfs but his main interest is KVM. As a active contributor, he was invited to give some presentations at some conferences: Japan LinuxCon 2011, Japan LinuxCon 2012 China CLK 2012, KVM Forum 2016, 2017, 2018. He is... Read More →

Yulei Zhang

Senior Software Engineer, Tencent

Yulei has more than 10 years experienced software developer working in Virtualization area. Used to work on GFX driver and involve in Intel GPU virtualization technology(a.k.a Intel GVT-g). He is currently a senior software developer Tencent Cloud, his recent presentations were: "Adaptive... Read More →

Thursday October 25, 2018 16:45 - 17:15 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

16:45 BST

Improving KVM x86 Nested-Virtualization - Liran Alon, Oracle

In this presentation, we will share our insights on current state and issues of KVM nVMX support in various mechanisms.
We will deep dive into a nVMX mechanism which had many issues: nVMX event-injection. We will cover how it works, examine an interesting issue we have encountered, analyze it's root-cause and explain the fix we have upstream. Then, we will cover recent work done on other nVMX mechanisms in high-level and highlight pending nVMX issues which are still not resolved and suggest possible directions for the future of nVMX.

Speakers

Liran Alon

Virtualization Architect, Oracle

Liran Alon is the Virtualization Architect of OCI Israel (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure). He is involved and lead projects in multiple areas of the company's public cloud offering such as Compute, Networking and Virtualization. In addition, Liran is a very active KVM contributor (mostly... Read More →

Improving KVM nVMX pdf

Thursday October 25, 2018 16:45 - 17:15 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

17:15 BST

BoF Session: TBA

Thursday October 25, 2018 17:15 - 18:00 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

BoFs

17:15 BST

BoF Session: TBA

Thursday October 25, 2018 17:15 - 18:00 BST
Fintry Auditorium

BoFs

08:00 BST

Registration

Friday October 26, 2018 08:00 - 17:30 BST
Strathblane Hall

Breaks & Registration

09:00 BST

Keynote: QEMU Status Report - Alex Bennée, Senior Software Engineer, Linaro

Speakers

Alex Bennée

Virtualisation Tech Lead, Linaro

Alex started learning to program in the 80s in an era of classic home computers that allowed you to get down and dirty at the system level. After graduating with a degree in Chemistry he's worked on a variety of projects including Fruit Machines, Line Cards, CCTV recorders and point-to-multipoint... Read More →

Friday October 26, 2018 09:00 - 09:15 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

Keynote

09:15 BST

Keynote: Libvirt Status Report - Peter Krempa, Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

Speakers

Peter Krempa

Friday October 26, 2018 09:15 - 09:30 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

Keynote

09:30 BST

Arm Timers; and Fire! - Christoffer Dall, Arm

A key feature that is missing in KVM/ARM compared to x86 is the support for stolen time reporting to virtual CPUs. Stolen time allows a virtual CPU to make more informed scheduling decisions on oversubscribed systems by factoring in CPU time used by the hypervisor for other tasks instead of running the virtual CPU. The Arm architecture defines two separate timers: The virtual and physical timers, which are both available to the OS, and further provides separate timers for the hypervisor. While the intention behind these architecture features is to provide OSes a mechanism for telling physical and virtual time apart, this does not work in practice. This talk explains why we cannot easily use the architected mechanism to provide stolen time on Arm, and why we must instead use a paravirtualized solution based on a shared page and how this approach differs slightly from the one used on x86.

Speakers

Christoffer Dall

Senior Principal Engineer, Arm

Christoffer Dall is the original author of the 32-bit KVM/Arm port and co-maintained KVM/Arm64 for several years before moving on to computer architecture work at Arm. Christoffer works on the Arm Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) and has +influenced the Arm virtualization architecture... Read More →

Friday October 26, 2018 09:30 - 10:00 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

09:30 BST

Hardware-Assisted Mediated Pass-Through with VFIO - Kevin Tian, Intel

Hardware-assisted I/O virtualization techniques (e.g. PCI Express® SR-IOV) have limitations on enabling hyper-scale usages, dynamic resource management and software composability, etc. While bringing improvements in those areas, mediated pass-through techniques (e.g. VFIO mediated device) suffer from software complexity and inefficiency problems, due to lacking of finer-grained hardware assistance for guaranteed efficiency and protection.
In this talk, Kevin Tian will introduce necessary architecture changes to enable finer-grained hardware assistance for mediated pass-through I/O virtualization, with Intel® Scalable I/O Virtualization technology as the example. A deep dive will be provided for key software framework changes, including design considerations spanning multiple components (VFIO, IOMMU, Qemu, etc.). Last is an overview of current enabling status and remaining opens.

Speakers

Kevin Tian

Principal Engineer, Intel

Kevin is a virtualization veteran from Intel with 16 years experience in open source virtualization projects (KVM, Xen, etc.), including multiple presentations in associated conferences. He is currently a software architect in Open source Technology Center of Intel, with current focus... Read More →

Friday October 26, 2018 09:30 - 10:00 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

10:00 BST

ARM virt 3.0 and Beyond: Towards a Better Scalability - Eric Auger, Red Hat

We start to see AArch64 servers with huge amount of physical processors, memory and IO devices. Virtual machines must scale with this trend. The ARM virt machine model had limitations with respect to virtual resource sizing. This talk aims at describing recent changes and work ongoing to achieve a better scalability.

Improvements related to vcpu, PCIe bus and memory sizing will be detailed. The talk will cover the support of larger guest physical address space and extension of existing RAM with DIMM slots. While reconsidering the RAM partitioning, we will discuss the challenge of assigned device IOVA reserved regions.

This is also an opportunity to draw a comparison between the ARM virt machine model and the PC Q35 machine model, in terms of virtual resources and vertical scalability. What bridges are left to cross to get feature parity?

Speakers

Eric Auger

Senior Software Engineer, Red hat

Eric has been involved in KVM/QEMU since 2014. He works at Red Hat, in the virtualization team. Eric has contributed to VFIO, KVM/ARM, and QEMU. He started to work on vIOMMU for ARM in 2017 and has contributed to the QEMU SMMUv3 and virtio-iommu devices. He has supported and promoted... Read More →

Friday October 26, 2018 10:00 - 10:30 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

10:00 BST

SPDK vhost Target: A Practical Solution to Accelerate Storage I/Os Inside VMs - Ziye Yang & Changpeng Liu, Intel

In this presentation, we would like to introduce SPDK’s user space vhost* solution (including vhost-scsi/blk/NVMe), which can collaborate with QEMU & KVM to accelerate virtio-scsi, virtio-blk and even emulated NVMe controller inside guest OS. Relying on SPDK vhost* solution, the performance of I/Os inside VMs can be greatly improved compared (e.g., with I/O IOPS increasing, I/O latency decreasing) compared with the existing solutions (e.g., original QEMU emulation solution, kernel vhost* solution). Moreover, we compare our SPDK vhost-scsi/blk/NVMe with other approaches like other solutions (e.g., direct device pass-through solution, SR-IOV solution, Zheng’s VFIO based solution in KVM 2017, FPGA acceleration solution, etc). Generally, our solution is much more scalable and practical. Currently, SPDK vhost* solution is adopted by many cloud service providers (e.g., Alibaba).

Speakers

Changpeng Liu

Cloud Software Engineer, Intel

Changpeng Liu is cloud software engineer in Intel and core maintainer of SPDK (Storage Performance Development Kit) open source project. His working areas include NVMe, storage IO virtualization and storage offload accelerators in IPU.

Ziye Yang

Staff Cloud software engineer, Intel

Ziye Yang is a staff software engineer at Intel and is currently involved in cloud native related projects. Before that, Ziye worked at EMC for 4.5 years. Ziye is interested in system virtualization, file system and storage related research and development work. Ziye currently has... Read More →

KVM Forum 26 Oct 2018 Vhost NVMe pdf

Friday October 26, 2018 10:00 - 10:30 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

10:30 BST

Coffee Break

Friday October 26, 2018 10:30 - 11:00 BST
Strathblane Foyer

Breaks & Registration

11:00 BST

L1TF and KVM - Alexander Graf, SUSE

Speakers

Alexander Graf

Principal Software Engineer, SUSE :)

Friday October 26, 2018 11:00 - 11:30 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

11:00 BST

VFIO Device Assignment Quirks, How to use Them and How to Avoid Them - Alex Williamson, Red Hat

In order to assign a peripheral I/O device to a virtual machine, the device needs to be isolated from the host and aspects of the hardware need to be virtualized for transparency to the guest. Some devices and platforms are better at this than others. Nonobservance to specifications and creative backdoors through hardware can present challenges to device assignment. In this presentation, Alex Williamson will look at some of the common mistakes found in hardware that make device assignment more challenging, how we work around those challenges, and how devices and platforms can better enable device assignment.

Speakers

Alex Williamson

Sr Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

Alex Williamson is a Senior Principal Software Engineer with Red Hat, maintainer of VFIO, Linux’s secure userspace driver framework, for both the kernel and QEMU components, and regular contributor to the Linux kernel IOMMU and PCI subsystems. Alex has given previous talks on VFIO... Read More →

Friday October 26, 2018 11:00 - 11:30 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

11:30 BST

What Did Spectre and Meltdown Teach about CPU Models? - Paolo Bonzini, Red Hat

During the past year, several architectural flaws in CPUs were disclosed, allowing user processes to read privileged memory or registers through cache side-channel attacks. For those flaws that were fixed through microcode updates, the effect of the updates may need to be visible in the guest, requiring changes in QEMU, libvirt and the rest of the virtualization stack. Even if no updated microcode was needed, as was the case for "Meltdown", the fixed kernel used a previously irrelevant CPU features in order to avoid an even more substantial performance drop.

All in all, these experiences showed that even higher-level management, such as OpenStack, need to be taught about the details of CPU configuration. This talk will explain how this conclusion was reached, what exactly is expected from management tools, and why.

Speakers

Paolo Bonzini

Distinguished Engineer, Red Hat, Inc.

Friday October 26, 2018 11:30 - 12:00 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

11:30 BST

Shared Virtual Addressing in KVM - Yi Liu & Jacob Pan, Intel Corporation

Shared Virtual Addressing in KVM (Liu Yi, Intel) - Shared Virtual Addressing (SVA) is a hardware extension to allow device directly accessing CPU virtual address, thus enables efficient workload submission on accelerators. SVA requires support in PCI bus, endpoint device and IOMMU, which has been made available by major hardware vendors (Intel, AMD, ARM, etc.). Then it becomes a hot area in cloud and data center, where same level of efficiency is expected when those accelerators are assigned to VMs.

This talk will first provide an overview of SVA and then the envisioned architecture of virtualizing SVA in KVM. Following that will be a deep dive of main SVA working flow cross multiple kernel/user components (Qemu, VFIO, IOMMU, etc.), especially about how to design neutral kernel APIs to work with different IOMMU vendors and also different vIOMMU models (emulated or para-virtualized).

Speakers

Yi Liu

Senior Software Engineer, Intel

Yi is a software engineer from Intel Virtualization team, focusing on I/O virtualization technology. He works on Shared Virtual Memory, Scalable IOV and vIOMMU stuffs in recent years. He has been invited to give presentations at LPC 2017, LinuxCon Beijing 2018, KVM Forum 2018, Intel... Read More →

Jacob Pan

Linux Kernel Developer, Intel Corporation

Jacob is a veteran Linux kernel developer at Intel. His most recent interest and work are on Shared Virtual Address/Memory as well as the IOMMU subsystem in general.Prior to that, Jacob contributed to power management, device drivers, interrupt, timers, and X86 core.

kvm forum vSVA yliu jpan jean eric pdf

Friday October 26, 2018 11:30 - 12:00 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

12:00 BST

KVM/arm Meets the Villain: Mitigating Spectre - Marc Zyngier, ARM

The recent discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities has
been an unfortunate disruption in the otherwise rapid pace of KVM/arm
development. Significant efforts have been put into analysing how CPU
implementations are affected, and in developing a mitigation framework
that covers both KVM and VMs by allowing VMs to call hypervisor
services to mitigate the vulnerabilities in the virtual machine.

This talk will briefly explain how the vulnerabilities affect ARM
systems and describe the range of techniques introduced in KVM/arm to
mitigate Spectre v2, v3, v3a and v4. We will explain how our
mitigation framework hides as much of the diversity of CPU
implementations and system integration while trying to keep the
overhead as low as possible.

Speakers

Marc Zyngier

Kernel Nacker, ARM

Marc has been working on the Linux kernel since an unexpected encounter with 0.99pl13 in 1993. His first contribution was merged in 1996 in the form of the original version of the MD driver. Having played with fault tolerant systems at Bull, worked on exotic (and ultimately doomed... Read More →

Friday October 26, 2018 12:00 - 12:30 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

12:00 BST

A Perfect Solution for Live Migration with Pass-through Devices - Quan Xu, Alibaba

Several efforts have been made on enabling live migration with pass-through devices, however, it is inevitable to modify device driver to save and restore device states, and mark a page as dirty after DMA memory access. These ‘ugly’ modifications are not compatible with legacy drivers or Windows virtual machine.
We design new virtio hardware devices (virtio-net based Nic and virtio-blk based storage). These devices can be pass-through with VFIO, then the legacy virtio-net/virtio-blk drivers are working without any modification in virtual machine, including Windows. We also extend the capability of devices to support live migration, including being aware of live migration, logging the page of DMA memory access, saving and restoring device states on run-time. And then we extend the migration and VFIO code to support live migration with pass-through these devices as QEMU 'emulated' devices.

Speakers

Quan Xu

staff engineer, alibaba

Xen community vTPM maintainer, committer KVM committer

Friday October 26, 2018 12:00 - 12:30 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

12:30 BST

Lunch (Attendees on Own)

Friday October 26, 2018 12:30 - 13:45 BST
TBA

Breaks & Registration

13:45 BST

A Driver Framework for qtest - Laurent Vivier, Red Hat

Unit tests for QEMU's virtual device currently are built upon the glib test framework. In order to ease the implementation of tests, QEMU provides the qtest protocol as well as a library of helper modules, libqos. libqos provides helper code for common device kinds (USB, PCI or virtio), but test needs to know how to start QEMU (machine type and parameters).

This talk will present an extension to libqos that wraps the glib test framework and augments it with knowledge of QEMU machine types and devices. Based on a description of the machines and devices, and on generic code to access the device, libqos generates all possible combinations of machines and architectures, and takes care of creating a "device object" for use in the tests.

This work was sponsored by Google, as part of GSoC, with mentoring from Laurent Vivier and Paolo Bonzini of Red Hat.

Speakers

Laurent Vivier

Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

Laurent is contributing to QEMU and KVM since 2007, after a détour into the world of HPC, he has joined in 2015 the Red Hat Virtualization team, focusing his efforts on KVM for POWER.

A driver framework for qtest pdf

Friday October 26, 2018 13:45 - 14:15 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

13:45 BST

Live Migration Support for GPU with SRIOV: Challenges and Solution - Zheng Xiao, Alibaba Cloud; Jerry Jiang & Ken Xue, AMD

As we all known pass-through device is not migration-friendly because of hypervisor hard to track device hardware's internal status. While there are still chance for specific device to support live migration: for example AMD GPU devices. AMD GPU product with SRIOV virtualization already deployed in alibaba cloud to support graphic remote rendering. Right now there are increasing demands from customers to support migration of vGPU. In this session, alibaba engineers will introduce a generic solution in VFIO how to migrate GPU device within VFIO framework, expose what's challenges we have. while AMD engineers will expose details what need to do inside SRIOV PF device driver to overcome these challenges. Last, there will be a short demo video how it looks like for audiences.

Speakers

Yinan Jerry Jiang

staff engineer, Advanced Micro Device Inc.

Jerry is AMD staff engineer working on AMD GPU device driver developing as well as GPU silicon design many years.

Ken Xue

AMD

XIAO ZHENG

staff engineer, Alibaba Group/Alibaba Cloud

Xiao is now staff engineer in alibaba cloud responsible for GPU virtualization and heterogeneous computing service developing. Xiao has many years experience in KVM hypervisor design and implementation, especially skillful in GPU virtualization. During the past few years.Xiao was... Read More →

Friday October 26, 2018 13:45 - 14:15 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

14:15 BST

The Functional Test Beast: Tame it, Bring it Home and Make it your Pet - Cleber Rosa, Red Hat, Inc.

Functional tests have traditionally been kept outside. These poor beasts get beaten by heavy work, but are not allowed to sit in the couch by your side, nor are they given the freedom to run inside your $HOME.

There have been valid reasons for this separation, but what if a far more comprehensive (yet safe and manageable) functional testing environment could be added to the regular developer's work-flow, pretty much for free?

In this talk we'll present QEMU's brand new functional testing architecture and how it lets developers easily write and run advanced functional tests.

Because anything functional demands to be practical, we'll write a test for a real QEMU bug and its fix, running it in different targets and configurations from the very same development tree. Finally, we'll give the test a definitive home alongside that fix, while putting the bug on a permanent tight leash.

Speakers

Cleber Rosa

Sr. Software Engineer, Red Hat

Cleber is a Software Engineer working for Red Hat on the virt team. He helps to develop the testing stack for virtualization technologies, such as KVM, QEMU and Libvirt. He is a maintainer of the Avocado test framework and sub projects such as Avocado-VT.

Friday October 26, 2018 14:15 - 14:45 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

14:15 BST

vdpa: vhost-mdev as a New vhost Protocol Transport - Cunming Liang & Tiwei Bie, Intel

vdpa is introduced to vhost so as to hookup with a virtio compatible DMA controller. It allows whatever HW device being represented as emulated virtio device being able to DMA buffers to guest directly.
vhost-mdev constructs a new transport carrying vhost protocol message, which leverages mdev framework to expose virtio compatible portion from its parent device. Qemu vhost takes vhost-mdev instances as general VFIO devices.
The talk is going to introduce all building blocks including qemu vhost-vfio adapter, kernel vhost-mdev helpers and a driver provider. Meanwhile, it will touch some points relevant to the new feature bits in virtio spec.

Speakers

Tiwei Bie

Software Engineer, Intel

Tiwei is DPDK virtio/vhost maintainer. The major effort recently is on qemu/kernel vdpa enabling and virtio 1.1 kernel driver.

Cunming Liang

Architect, Intel

Cunming is architect of data plane software, spending years on high performance network I/O of general purpose CPU and its virtualization includes para-virtualization and SR-IOV. One of the recent effort is to drive NFV grade virtual network device towards higher performance, smaller... Read More →

Friday October 26, 2018 14:15 - 14:45 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

14:45 BST

Testing in QEMU and libvirt: Beyond Make and Make Check - Yash Mankad, Red Hat

Automated testing in the QEMU and libvirt communities is largely focused on running unit tests on various environments using the `make check` command, but has never developed beyond that into a centralized continuous integration environment. In this session, Yash Mankad will give an overview on the initiative undertaken by the Virtualization group at Red Hat to look beyond `make check`, by leveraging Ansible and the Avocado testing framework to expand automated test coverage executing across multiple architectures, operating systems, and testing environments. Yash will also share his ideas on integrating testing initiatives already in place, like patchew and travis CI, with this common platform. This initiative will result in QEMU and libvirt developers gaining three times the platform coverage while providing a central point for continuous integration for the QEMU and libvirt projects.

Speakers

Yash Mankad

Software Engineer - Virtualization, CI, Automation, Red Hat

Yash works in the Virtualization group at Red Hat where he is leading the efforts to implement a continuous integration environment that implements multi-architecture testing for qemu-kvm, and libvirt on RHEL, Fedora, and CentOS. Yash has previously given a talk titled "Avocado and... Read More →

Friday October 26, 2018 14:45 - 15:15 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

14:45 BST

Empty Promise: Zero-Copy Receive for vhost - Mike Rapoport, IBM

In para-virtual networking with virtio-net/vhost, the copying of packet between the hypervisor and the guest is one of the major sources of the overhead, especially for the large packets. And, although, zero-copy transmit was merged into the Linux kernel a few years ago, the "receive side zero copy" item is still in the KVM NetworkingTodo, and probably will remain there for some more time.

Our attempted approach to implementation of zero-copy receive for virtio-net and vhost that leveraged receive-side steering abilities of the modern high speed network cards didn't improve anything and just moved the bottleneck to another place.

The talk presents what we've tried, why we thought there will be an improvement and what were the reasons for their absence .

Speakers

Mike Rapoport

Researcher, IBM

Mike has lots of programming experience in different areas ranging from medical equipment to visual simulation, but most of all he likes hacking on Linux kernel and low level stuff. Throughout his career Mike promoted use of free and open source software and made quite a few contributions... Read More →

Friday October 26, 2018 14:45 - 15:15 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

15:15 BST

Coffee Break

Friday October 26, 2018 15:15 - 15:45 BST
Strathblane Foyer

Breaks & Registration

15:45 BST

Facilitating Incremental Backup - Eric Blake, Red Hat

As any good sysadmin will tell you, collecting data backups are essential for future recovery needs. But making them more efficient and flexible has been an ongoing quest, involving multiple improvements throughout the virtualization stack. In this talk, Eric Blake will give a demonstration of the newest technique available through the qemu+libvirt stack, which now support the ability to orchestrate online incremental backups where third-party clients can grab just the dirty clusters at their own speed, rather than waiting for qemu to push a full backup image to a destination location.

Speakers

Eric Blake

Software Engineer, Red Hat

Eric Blake is a software engineer at Red Hat, working on block device management in virtualization. He has contributed extensively to qemu and libvirt. He has spoken at several past KVM Forums, most recently about making the most of NBD in Oct 2019.

2018 libvirt incremental backup odp

2018 libvirt incremental backup expanded pdf

intro cast

full cast

incr cast

Friday October 26, 2018 15:45 - 16:15 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

15:45 BST

RAM is Getting More Complex - Dr. David Alan Gilbert, Red Hat

QEMU models 'RAMBlocks' which used to mostly actually be RAM or ROM; over time they've slowly got more complex. We've got huge pages, non volatile storage, devices, shared memory.
I'll talk about the different types, and talk about some of the problems they can cause from migrations point of view.

Speakers

Dr. David Alan Gilbert

Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat Limited

I work on Red Hat's QEMU/KVM team on live migration. I've previously spoken at KVM Forum on how to avoid migration failures, and with Andrea Arcangeli on Postcopy migration.

ramcomplexity pdf

Friday October 26, 2018 15:45 - 16:15 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

16:15 BST

Qemu Backup Status - Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy, Virtuozzo

Large work is underway in Qemu around backups, which involves dirty-bitmaps management, NBD protocol extensions and external backup API. The presentation will describe what was done and alredy available and what is upcoming.

Speakers

Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy

software developer, Virtuozzo

Vladimir works in Virtuozzo, maintaining qemu-kvm-vz package and deals in the main with Qemu block layer, developing features around backup, qcow2 and NBD. Vladimir is a co-maintainer of NBD and Block Jobs subsystems in Qemu. Some ongoing projects are: filter-based backup architecture... Read More →

Friday October 26, 2018 16:15 - 16:45 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

16:15 BST

Guest Free Page Hinting - Nitesh Narayan Lal, Red Hat, Inc.

KVM guest suffers a major setback when it comes to freeing the unused memory. With the current implementation, when a guest frees certain memory chunk its availability for reuse is never communicated back to the host. Due to which the host fails to reclaim the memory freed by the guest for any other purpose. This talk presents the idea of guest free page hinting for efficiently handing freed memory between the guest and the host. This presentation also briefly covers memory ballooning and its pros and cons compared to this approach, the current design, challenges, performance, and possible improvement areas.

Speakers

Nitesh Narayan Lal

Software Engineer, Red Hat Inc

Nitesh is a Software Engineer in the Virtualization team at Red Hat. He is currently working on projects related to memory management and Fuzzers. He likes to research and read about latest security breaches, and breakthroughs. Nitesh first presented a talk on KVM & Virtio Introduction... Read More →

Friday October 26, 2018 16:15 - 16:45 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

16:45 BST

Background Snapshots - Denis Plotnikov, Virtuozzo

The VM snapshot is a widely-used feature to save a VM state. Currently, when you make a snapshot you are forced to pause your virtual machine until the snapshot is done. This is undesirable behavior because it's seen for the user as a temporary VM shutdown which is something you don't want when your goal is to provide your end-users with good quality of service.
I would like to introduce background snapshots: the feature allowing not to pause your virtual machine when making a VM snapshot. It keeps your virtual machine up and running until the end of the snapshotting process. I would like to explain some technical details on how we have achieved that and very short overview on how to use the feature.

Speakers

Denis Plotnikov

Software developer, Virtuozzo

A member of Server Virtualization Team at Virtuozzo

kvm forum 2018 background snapshot 20181017 pptx

Friday October 26, 2018 16:45 - 17:15 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 1

16:45 BST

virtio-mem: Paravirtualized Memory - David Hildenbrand, Red Hat

Memory hot(un)plug is a complicated matter. Especially when it comes to reliable memory hotunplug. While some architectures in KVM support memory hot(un)plug (e.g. x86), others have limited or no support (e.g. s390x).

Most hardware interfaces (like ACPI) are clearly focused on the concept of DIMMs. This usually implies that only fairly huge pieces of memory can be plugged and unplugged, whereby the latter can be problematic and easily fail.

In some virtual environments, people use ACPI for memory hotplug and balloon devices (e.g. virtio-balloon) as a mean for more reliable unplug of memory - which has a different set of restrictions.

In this talk, an introduction to the topic is given, the involved problems are outlined and virtio-mem is introduced, providing a single paravirtualized interface for fine grained memory hot(un)plug.

Speakers

David Hildenbrand

Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

David has been working on QEMU/KVM for almost 6 years now. His current projects are mostly centered around memory hot(un)plug and memory overcommit in the context of virtual machines. While he's involved with QEMU/KVM on s390x and Linux memory management in general, his main projects... Read More →

Friday October 26, 2018 16:45 - 17:15 BST
Fintry Auditorium

KVM Forum Track 2

17:15 BST

KVM Attendee Group Photo + Closing Session

Friday October 26, 2018 17:15 - 18:00 BST
Sidlaw Auditorium

Keynote