[2019] VirtIO without the Virt - Towards Implementations in Hardware by Michael Tsirkin

VirtIO was designed to standardize hypervisor interfaces for virtual machines - but we are beginning to see the emergence of Virtio hardware. This talk will answer the questions: why does this make sense, what works and what are the issues hardware implementations of virtio have to overcome? Topics to be covered: What is the difference between hardware virtio devices and virtio data path accelerators? What are the minimal requirements of virtio in hardware? How can we handle compatibility, including hardware bugs and limitations? How to make live migration work? What about overcommit? Which changes included in the recent virtio specification help design hardware virtio devices? Which known issues remain and how does the Virtio committee plat to address them? Why design Virtio in hardware? Are there alternatives? Why get involved with the Virtio specification process? --- Michael S. Tsirkin Red Hat Distinguished Engineer Michael has been with Red Hat for more than 10 years. In his role as a Distinguished Engineer he acts as a chair of the Virtio Technical Committee, overseeing the development of the virtio specification for virtual devices. He also maintains several subsystems in QEMU and Linux and has over the years made multiple contributions to QEMU, Linux and KVM.