[Qemu-devel] Luvalley-5 has been released (with whitepaper!): enables arbitrary OS to run VMs without any modification

[Qemu-devel] Luvalley-5 has been released (with whitepaper!): enables arbitrary OS to run VMs without any modification

[Xiaodong Yi]

Luvalley is a lightweight type-1 Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM).
Its part of source codes are derived from KVM to virtualize
CPU instructions and memory management unit (MMU). However, its
overall architecture is completely different from KVM, but somewhat
like Xen. Luvalley runs outside of Linux, just like Xen's architecture.
Any operating system, including Linux, could be used as
Luvalley's scheduler, memory manager, physical device driver provider
and virtual IO device
emulator. Currently, Luvalley supports Linux and Windows. That is to
say, one may run Luvalley to boot a Linux or Windows, and then run
multiple virtualized operating systems on such Linux or Windows.

>From the point of view of Qemu, Luvalley enables Qemu to utilize the
Intel's VT extension to gain much better performance.

If you are interested in Luvalley project, you may download the source
codes as well as the whitepaper from
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/luvalley/

The main changes of this release (Luvalley-5) are:

 * The code derived is updated from KVM-83 to KVM-88

 * Supports both Intel and AMD CPUs

 * Automatically identify Intel and AMD CPUs

This release (Luvalley-5) includes:

 * Luvalley whitepaper (the first edition)

 * Luvalley binary and source code tarball

 * Readme, changelog and release notes files

Re: [Qemu-devel] Luvalley-5 has been released (with whitepaper!): enables arbitrary OS to run VMs without any modification

[Alexander Graf]

On 21.01.2010, at 15:19, Xiaodong Yi wrote:

> Luvalley is a lightweight type-1 Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM).
> Its part of source codes are derived from KVM to virtualize
> CPU instructions and memory management unit (MMU). However, its
> overall architecture is completely different from KVM, but somewhat
> like Xen. Luvalley runs outside of Linux, just like Xen's architecture.
> Any operating system, including Linux, could be used as
> Luvalley's scheduler, memory manager, physical device driver provider
> and virtual IO device
> emulator. Currently, Luvalley supports Linux and Windows. That is to
> say, one may run Luvalley to boot a Linux or Windows, and then run
> multiple virtualized operating systems on such Linux or Windows.
> 
> From the point of view of Qemu, Luvalley enables Qemu to utilize the
> Intel's VT extension to gain much better performance.
> 
> If you are interested in Luvalley project, you may download the source
> codes as well as the whitepaper from
>  http://sourceforge.net/projects/luvalley/
> 
> The main changes of this release (Luvalley-5) are:
> 
> * The code derived is updated from KVM-83 to KVM-88

It might be a better idea to use upstream kernel sources as basis. The KVM snapshots are rather deprecated FWIW.

Is the code to leverage Luvally vastly different from the accessors for KVM? Maybe it'd be enough to have a wrapper for kvm_ioctl() that sends ioctls off to Luvally instead of KVM to make the existing infrastructure work. That way upstream support should be a no-brainer and you get all the upstream qemu work for free.

Also, this would finally make the windows builds more useful again.

Alex

Re: [Qemu-devel] Luvalley-5 has been released (with whitepaper!): enables arbitrary OS to run VMs without any modification

[Xiaodong Yi]

Thanks for your advice. I'm now preparing to update the Qemu for
Windows (not started yet). I originally though it should be better to
use Qemu-KVM in Linux because, for example, Qemu-KVM supports SMP
guests. I will review the newest Qemu version before updating Qemu for
Linux.

Regards,

Xiaodong

2010/1/21 Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de>:
>
> On 21.01.2010, at 15:19, Xiaodong Yi wrote:
>
>> Luvalley is a lightweight type-1 Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM).
>> Its part of source codes are derived from KVM to virtualize
>> CPU instructions and memory management unit (MMU). However, its
>> overall architecture is completely different from KVM, but somewhat
>> like Xen. Luvalley runs outside of Linux, just like Xen's architecture.
>> Any operating system, including Linux, could be used as
>> Luvalley's scheduler, memory manager, physical device driver provider
>> and virtual IO device
>> emulator. Currently, Luvalley supports Linux and Windows. That is to
>> say, one may run Luvalley to boot a Linux or Windows, and then run
>> multiple virtualized operating systems on such Linux or Windows.
>>
>> From the point of view of Qemu, Luvalley enables Qemu to utilize the
>> Intel's VT extension to gain much better performance.
>>
>> If you are interested in Luvalley project, you may download the source
>> codes as well as the whitepaper from
>>  http://sourceforge.net/projects/luvalley/
>>
>> The main changes of this release (Luvalley-5) are:
>>
>> * The code derived is updated from KVM-83 to KVM-88
>
> It might be a better idea to use upstream kernel sources as basis. The KVM snapshots are rather deprecated FWIW.
>
> Is the code to leverage Luvally vastly different from the accessors for KVM? Maybe it'd be enough to have a wrapper for kvm_ioctl() that sends ioctls off to Luvally instead of KVM to make the existing infrastructure work. That way upstream support should be a no-brainer and you get all the upstream qemu work for free.
>
> Also, this would finally make the windows builds more useful again.
>
> Alex

Re: [Qemu-devel] Luvalley-5 has been released (with whitepaper!): enables arbitrary OS to run VMs without any modification

[Alexander Graf]

On 23.01.2010, at 13:07, Xiaodong Yi wrote:

> Thanks for your advice. I'm now preparing to update the Qemu for
> Windows (not started yet). I originally though it should be better to
> use Qemu-KVM in Linux because, for example, Qemu-KVM supports SMP
> guests. I will review the newest Qemu version before updating Qemu for
> Linux.

Well, SMP support is definitely coming to upstream Qemu as well. IMHO the best integration strategy would really be a simple kvm_*_ioctl wrapper that sends it off to Luvally in upstream Qemu.

But please coordinate with Avi and Anthony before you start the real work on what they think is best. After all, they'll be the two people committing it.

Alex