Hey virt-contaiNerds -

I had the pleasure of helping review issues/PRs for Kata this week as part of the review rotation. Here are some highlights from the project over the past week:

We had several project-infrastructure pull requests created and merged. Late last week, Salvador Fuentes

identified that our burn-rate for CI resources has been increasing with the number of jobs and length of PR based CI jobs. This motivated several of us to stop and look at improvments that could be done. Initial changes include utilizing smaller container images for basic tests and reducing duplicated tests across various jobs. We plan to make further improvements by predicating larger test jobs by a passing static-check (ie, proper utilization of a pipeline), and better utilizing filters to not require full CI for non-code changes.

While virtio-fs experimental support has been available with 1.8.0-alpha0, more extensive utilization of the feature is

hamstrung by a lack of memory hotplug support. We're working with StefanH and DavidG to resolve this limitation. See https://github.com/kata-containers/runtime/issues/1745

We received initial PRs for adding support for the ACRN hypervisor. Review is ongoing.  See https://github.com/kata-containers/runtime/pull/1779

A couple of stability-improvements for kata shimv2 were merged.

There are several outstanding PRs which could use help moving forward, and I marked these with the label `needs-help`. If any sound interesting, please jump in! Examples include:

- To avoid needing to do CPU or memory hotplug and still create an optimally sized VM, Manohar Castelino has been suggesting

creating sizing annotations for Kata, and creating an example k8s admission controller which would set kata annotations in the PodSpec, which Kata would then consume. The initial PR has some suggestions on how to do this in a generic way, but is starting to go stale. We'd love to have help here. See https://github.com/kata-containers/runtime/pull/1695

- An initial PR for moving hypervisor code from virtcontainers into a hypervisor pkg was provided by Samuel. This is a great code

cleanup/refactoring opportunnity, and we could use help finishing this one up.  See https://github.com/kata-containers/runtime/pull/1208

Next week, Peng Tao is listed as the release lead for stable releases, which will include stable-1.6, stable-1.7 and 1.8.0-alpha branches.

Thanks,

Eric