[Kata-hypervisor] Link to the Hypervisor Prototype

Anthony Liguori aliguori at amazon.com
Thu Jun 7 19:34:58 UTC 2018


"Jessie Frazelle (TUPPERWARE)" <jessfraz at microsoft.com> writes:

> Ya I guess I was wondering what those of us who don't have to support
> rhel 6 or even 7 and can run close to mainline could do :)

Old kernels usually aren't the challenge.

It's supporting distro kernels where there is an insistence on having a
single kernel for all use-caess.

As an example, you generally don't need a PC keyboard controller to boot
Linux.  It's been that way for a long time.

However, the typical distro kernel is configured in a way in that the
absence of a keyboard controller will result in a 1-second startup pause
while probing fails.

You can Kconfig it out or you can just emulate the controller to avoid
having to it.  Turns out that it's not so bad to emulate (less than
1,000 SLOCs) and is mostly just ifs and switches.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

>
> ________________________________________
> From: Steve Gordon <sgordon at redhat.com>
> Sent: Thursday, June 7, 2018 9:05:36 AM
> To: Jessie Frazelle (TUPPERWARE)
> Cc: Anthony Liguori; Jon Olson; kata-hypervisor at lists.katacontainers.io
> Subject: Re: [Kata-hypervisor] Link to the Hypervisor Prototype
>
> On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 10:04 PM, Jessie Frazelle (TUPPERWARE) <jessfraz at microsoft.com<mailto:jessfraz at microsoft.com>> wrote:
> I'm not convinced by 9p
>
> Also I don't think a cloud native VMM or anything like that is the answer... But I'm a huge fan of being able to run things on bare metal or my desktop :P
>
> In my ideal scenario it would be the bare minimum needed and also not have anything that required backwards compat to old kernels.. because why..
>
>
> It depends how we define old :). In the context of the Vancouver discussion I had said, selfishly from a KubeVirt perspective (admittedly a quite different use case to Katacontainers), that we would be interested in a thinner, more modular, solution than we have today but that we still have a foreseeable need to run RHEL 6+ (so 2.6.32+GIANTDIFF as someone put it ;)) and W2K12+ on our current timelines.
>
> So I think the reason older kernels were in the discussion was my fault, but at the time it seemed like other folks were also interested in at least some variations along that spectrum and this was roughly in line with what Intel have been able to get working with their cut down qemu builds - notwithstanding that additional issues may likely appear when it comes to running any existing "real" workload VM with all its knobs on such a platform.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Steve



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