Hi Allison,

The library hypervisor sounds very interesting, do you have any publication or code released?

For kata, when you talk about image format, do you mean those like "qcow2" or "raw"? We currently mainly use raw format devices for qemu. 

And if we insert devices into VM, we may insert loop devices, other block devices, or ceph rbds, etc.

Xu



On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 11:17 PM, Allison Randal allison@lohutok.net wrote:

I wasn't at the session where this started (because I was speaking on a

panel at the same time about edge computing, containers/VMs, and hybrid

approaches), but several people pointed me at this list, because I'm

currently working on a lightweight hypervisor written in Rust (on top of

KVM), as PhD research at the University of Cambridge.


I'm interested in getting more details on what features of QEMU are used

by Kata Containers. Specifically, what image formats and devices do you

need? This information would be equally valuable to a stripped-down

QEMU, so it wouldn't be a distraction from that work, just a side

benefit of informing other approaches to lightweight hypervisors.



The fundamental concept of my work is building a "library hypervisor",

somewhat analogous to the way unikernels are a "library operating

system". So, instead of a monolithic body of code, it is a collection of

Rust libraries that provide devices, support for various image formats,

an interface to KVM, etc. A final compiled hypervisor imports a minimal

set of libraries to get the minimal set of features that it needs.


I had considered Kata Containers as a possible example target, though I

was prioritizing it behind libvirt, minikube, LinuxKit, and a few other

potential targets. I wouldn't mind bumping Kata Containers up to a

higher priority, if people here would be interested in a prototype to try.


Allison


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Xu Wang
CTO & Cofounder, Hyper
github/twitter/wechat: @gnawux
http://hyper.sh

Hyper_: Make VM run like container