Re: [Qemu-devel] Luvalley project: enable Qemu to utilize hardwarevirtualization extensions on arbitrary operating system

["Kazu" <kazoo@r3.dion.ne.jp>]

Hi,

Great work!

I tried Luvalley with both Fedora 8 and WinXP. It needs to be root to start
qemu-system-x86_64 on Fedora 8. It can run as fast as KVM does. I am
surprised to see QEMU can run fast on WinXP Dom0.

When I used WinXP as Dom0 and suspended/resumed it, the WinXP is very slow
and I can't use it.

Do you have your own mailing list? Where can I report bugs?

Keep up the good work.

kazu

Thursday, March 26, 2009 12:37 PM Xiaodong Yi wrote:

> Luvalley is a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) spawned from the KVM
> project. 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, but it still uses Linux as its scheduler, memory
> manager, physical device driver provider and virtual IO device
> emulator. Moreover, Luvalley may run WITHOUT Linux. In theory, any
> operating system could take the place of Linux to provide the above
> services. 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.
>
> In KVM, Qemu is adopted as the IO device emulator. From the point of
> view of Qemu, KVM enables Qemu to utilize hardware virtualization
> extensions such as Intel's VT on Linux. As for Luvalley, Qemu is also
> adopted as its IO device emulator. However, Luvalley could enable Qemu
> to utilize hardware virtualization extensions on ANY operating system.
>
> If you are interested in Luvalley project, you may download Luvalley's
> source codes from
>     http://sourceforge.net/projects/luvalley/
>
> The following is more details about Luvalley.
>
> Luvalley is an external hypervisor, just like Xen
> (http://www.xen.org). It boots and controls the X86 machine before
> starting up any operating system. However, Luvalley is much smaller
> and simpler than Xen. Most jobs of Xen, such as scheduling, memory
> management, interrupt management, etc, are shifted to Linux (or any
> other OS), which is running on top of Luvalley.
>
> Luvalley gets booted first when the X86 machine is power on. It boots
> up all CPUs in SMP system and enables their virtualization extensions.
> Then the MBR (Master Boot Record) is read out and executed in CPU's
> virtualization mode. Following this way, a Linux (or any other OS)
> will be booted up at last. Luvalley assigns all physical memory,
> programmable interrupt controller (PIC) and IO devices to this
> priviledged OS. Following Xen, we call this OS as "domain 0" (dom0)
> OS.
>
> Like KVM, a modified Qemu is running on dom0 Linux to provide virtual
> IO devices for other operating systems running on top of Luvalley. We
> also follow Xen to call these operating systems "domain user" (domU).
> That is to say, there must be exact one dom0 OS and may be several
> domU OSs running on top of Luvalley. Each domU OS corresponds to a
> Qemu process in dom0 OS. The memory of domU is allocated from dom0 by
> Qemu. And when Qemu is scheduled to run by dom0 Scheduler, it will
> call Luvalley to run the corresponding domU.
>
> Moreover, as Luvalley requires nothing from the dom0 Linux kernel,
> other operating systems such as Windows, FreeBSD, etc can also serve
> as dom0 OS, provided that Qemu can be ported to these operating
> systems. Since Qemu is an userland application and is able to cross
> platform, such porting is feasible. Currently, we have added the
> Luvalley support into Qemu-0.10.0, which can be compiled and run in
> Windows. With the help of Luvalley, Qemu-0.10.0 runs much faster
> becuase it could utilize the VT support provided by Intel CPU.
>
> In summary, Luvalley inherited all merits from KVM. Especially,
> Luvalley is very small and simple. It is even more easy-to-use than
> KVM because it does not depend on specific Linux kernel version. Every
> version of Linux can serve as Luvalley's dom0 OS, except that Qemu
> cannot run on it.
>
> In addition, we think Luvalley's architecture meets the demand on both
> desktop and server operating system area:
>
> 1. In the desktop area, there are many kinds of operating systems
> runing on various hardwares and devices. In theory, it is rather easy
> to add virtualization ability for all kinds of operating systems,
> without sacrificing the hardware compatibility and the user
> experience. Moreover, Luvalley is very easy to install. It requires
> only a boot loader which supports Multiboot Specification, e.g., Grub,
> WinGrub (http://sourceforge.net/projects/grub4dos), etc.
>
> 2. In the server area, especially for large-scale server systems (for
> example, throusands of CPUs), a single Linux is not suitable to manage
> the whole system. Therefore, KVM cannot be used properly. Luvalley's
> architecture is more suitable for servers. For example, it can be used
> to divide physical resources to partitions, and run a Linux for each
> partition. In addition, Luvalley is very small and may be put into
> BIOS to serve as a virtulization firmware.
>