QEMU

Here is a video I've been waiting for by Jike Song from Intel. The KVM Forum 2014 was held in conjunction with the recent LinuxCon Europe and someone (from the Linux Foundation or the KVM Forum) has been processing and posting presentation videos to YouTube in a staggered fashion. About 13 hours ago this video appeared. When I noticed the topic on the KVM Forum schedule (along with the slide deck [PDF]) a week or two before the event, I was really looking forward to learning more.

The current implementation, so far as basic features go, seems to be fairly complete but it is currently targeted specifically at the Intel Haswell architecture using the i915 video driver. The presenter says that the approach taken should be adaptable to other GPU architectures beyond Intel. Their initial goal is to get the code released (it is under a dual GPL/MIT license) and to work with the KVM development community to get it upstreamed and part of KVM proper... and to work on more advanced feature implementation. As it stands now the basic features are present: hardware assisted GPU functionality for VMs in a shared fashion that offers 80-90% of native speed. Near the end of the presentation is a demo video that shows two Linux KVM VMs each running GPU intensive software (one game, one benchmark). As I understand it, when a GPU-driven application is displayed it is full-screen and there isn't currently a windowed mode to show more than one VM at a time. I do wonder how well 3D accelerated graphics would display over a remoting protocol like SPICE? Enjoy!

The KVM Forum 2011 was held at the Hyatt Regency in Vancouver, Canada on August 15-16. It was co-located with LinuxCon North America 2011.

LinuxCon and the KVM Forum were both sponsored by The Linux Foundation who recorded a large number of videos from both events. Unfortunately, The Linux Foundation had few security breaches to deal with on their kernel.org and linux.com domains which (I'm guessing) has greatly delayed them doing post-production work on the recordings and posting them publicly.

I found that Red Hat had recently posted a handful of the KVM Forum videos to YouTube but since they were only available in the flv and mp4 formats, I decided to re-encode them and post them to archive.org as webm (a free, open source, non-patent encumbered video format). I think archive.org is really a better place for them. Red Hat released them under a Creative Commons, Attribution - No Derivative Works 3.0 License. I have not altered the videos in any way other than re-encoding them to webm in a smaller resolution (624x352) and bitrate (664Kbit) making them one half to one third of the original filesize yet maintaining reasonable quality. Modern Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera browsers can play webm as can stand-alone players like VLC, Totem, and mplayer.

They are all highly technical presentations for those interested in the nitty-gritty details of the Linux KVM virtualization Hypervisor. I have embedded the first, short keynote video below and given download URLs for the rest. Thanks to Red Hat for posting them!

One thing to note is that the camera / recording is statically positioned and does not show the presenter slides so I have also included the links to the slide decks in PDF format. For a better understanding, you are strongly encouraged to look at the slides while watching the videos. Also be warned that some presenters may occasionally use curse words.

Here's a zip file containing all slide decks in PDF format for all of the presentations.

Enjoy!

QEMU in actionHave you tried QEMU? I must admit that I hadn't really tried it until recently... although I have used VMware and Parallels. Supposedly Xen and the new KVM both draw from QEMU code. What is QEMU? Obligatory quote from the QEMU wikipedia entry:

QEMU is free software written by Fabrice Bellard that implements a fast processor emulator, allowing a user to simulate a complete computer system within another one. It is similar to projects such as Bochs, VMware Workstation and PearPC, but has several features these lack, including increased speed on x86, and support for multiple architectures in-progress. By using dynamic translation it achieves a reasonable speed while being easy to port on new host CPUs.

I'm not sure why that says that QEMU is faster than VMware, because it isn't... but QEMU can emulate several different CPU families other than just x86. Read on if you want to hear about my experience installing Windows XP SP2 from an .iso file.