Re: Invitation: Virtio and Vhost-User Ecosystem BoF - LPC 2026 (Oct 7, Prague)

[Stefano Garzarella <sgarzare@redhat.com>]

+Cc qemu-devel

On Wed, Sep 30, 2026 at 06:38:42PM +0200, Dorinda Bassey wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>I'd like to invite you to join us for a Birds of a Feather session at
>the Linux Plumbers Conference 2026:
>
>"Virtio and Vhost-User Ecosystem for Production and Automotive Systems"
>
>When: Tuesday, October 7, 2026 at 17:45 CEST (UTC+2) (45 minutes)
>Where: South Hall 1 B, Prague Congress Centre
>Speakers: Dorinda Bassey, Albert Esteve, Stefano Garzarella (Red Hat)
>
>If you are unable to join in-person, there's also an option for remote
>attendance,
>See the link on how to register: https://lpc.events/event/20/page/267-attend
>
>Description:
>The vhost-user protocol started as a simple QEMU feature, but it has
>grown into a standard used across the entire Linux virtualization
>community. Today, it powers production workloads in the cloud (e.g.
>QEMU and cloud-hypervisor), lightweight environments like libkrun, and
>modern automotive systems.
>However, as the ecosystem expands, we are hitting new "plumbing"
>bottlenecks. For example, the protocol specification is still stored
>inside the QEMU documentation, which makes it harder for other
>projects to participate in its growth. At the same time, automotive
>deployments are introducing strict new needs, such as safety
>certification, real-time performance, and long-term support, that
>impact everyone.
>This BoF will bring developers and users together to address these
>challenges and other emerging topics across the ecosystem. Our goal is
>to establish better coordination, align technical roadmaps for both
>cloud and automotive, and build shared tests and tools to ensure all
>implementations work together.
>
>Key Discussion Topics:
>- vhost-user Specification Governance: Discuss official location for
>the vhost-user specification
>- Automotive Virtualization Requirements & Reference Platforms:
>Coordinate deployment needs across Automotive platforms [1]
>- Real-time performance needs (camera, display, CAN)
>- Status Update: Ongoing work on vhost-user device (virtio-Media,
>virtio-can, virtio-rtc, etc) [2][3]
>- Graphics Stack Alignment: on roadmaps for shared dependencies like
>rutabaga_gfx across libkrun, crosvm, vhost-device-gpu [4]
>- Shared Virtio Message-Parsing Crates: Evaluate creating unified Rust
>crates for Virtio device specs to share virtqueue parsing logic across
>backends and VMMs
>- Open questions about:
>  - vhost-user Specification Refinements: Identify protocol gaps,
>missing features, and necessary standard improvements
>  - New Virtio/vhost-user Device Proposals
>
>References:
>[1] https://source.android.com/docs/automotive/virtualization/reference_platform
>[2] https://lore.kernel.org/virtualization/ab2FlQTWUxl0KmlT@fedora/
>[3] https://github.com/rust-vmm/vhost-device/pull/944
>[4] https://github.com/magma-gpu/rutabaga_gfx/issues/24
>
>Session details: https://lpc.events/event/20/contributions/2365/
>
>Looking forward to seeing you there!
>
>Best regards,
>Dorinda Bassey
>Red Hat
>