Re: KVM call minutes for Nov 30

Nadav Har'El
2010-12-01T09:27:37Z

Hi,

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010, Chris Wright wrote about "KVM call minutes for Nov 30":
> nested VMX
> - no progress, future plans are unclear

Avi Kivity's request to discuss this issue came around an hour before the
call, and I missed it, so I wasn't on the call. Sorry.
I'm the only one doing any coding in nested VMX, so I suggest that next time
that you want to talk about it you check that I'll be there ;-) Or even
better, just use the mailing list to discuss.

But more to the point, what I've been doing recently is implementing Avi's
and Gleb's review comments, which I'm taking seriously, but often
(unsuprisingly) turn out to be a case of "easier said than done".

Specifically, in the last review I was asked to make sure that shadow-on-EPT
works so that users do not need to remember to add the "ept=0" module option
on L0. Unfortunately, while this should have been relatively simple (and it
DID work in some time in the distant past), there appears to be a bug that I
have spent the last couple of weeks chasing - so far unsucessfully.

Regarding future plans:

I really want to get nested VMX into KVM, and I'm already doing whatever I
can to make this a reality. But unfortunately, I am not yet a seasoned KVM or
VMX expert (I'm trying to become one...), and it wasn't I who wrote the
original nested VMX code, so every new issue and every new feature that I am
asked to fix is new to me, and takes me considerable time to learn, debug,
and fix.

I hope to continue working on nested VMX, next year as well, but IBM's (my
employer's) plans for next year are not yet set in stone. In any case, I
firmly believe that the nested VMX feature will be better, and be available
more quickly, if I am not the only person working on it. I will be very happy
if somebody reading this wants to work on this with me. This is the main
reason why I wanted to put nested VMX in the main tree (even before it is
100% bug-free and feature-complete), because that would make it much easier
for more people to try this feature, and hopefully to help me fix problems
which bother them.

Nadav.

--
Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, Dec 1 2010, 24 Kislev 5771
nyh@math.technion.ac.il |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |"A mathematician is a device for turning
http://nadav.harel.org.il |coffee into theorems" -- P. Erdos