Welcome to virtualization at corecollective

[Mark Burton]

Hi All,

Thanks for subscribing to the CoreCollective Virtualization Working Group. I'm Mark Burton, and I will be the Technical Chair of the WG. I'm working with Julianus Larson from Linaro to get things set up and kick off the first meeting which will be on Wednesday the 27th May (16:00 CEST). Julianus will send out a separate invite for that. Ahead of that we’d like to shape the agenda around what your organisation actually cares about.

Where we are so far -

The WG's purpose is to Enable collaboration on evolving Arm-architecture simulation, emulation, & virtualization technologies for secure firmware, hypervisor, kernel and AI workloads. Our exact working scope is to be defined, and I would welcome input, but for now, my working assumption is that it covers everything from hardware emulation topics (QEMU TCG), through virtualisation (e.g. QEMU KVM, and the “virtio” subsystems), as well as potentially the hypervisors and O/S’s that may run on a target and make use of those virt devices: all within the context of ARM architecture. I imagine we are likely to form (at least) five sub-groups to address these different concerns, and I expect to try to maintain cohesion between them.

1/ Virtulization (e.g. Kernel and hypervisor)
2/ Simulation (e.g. QEMU etc)
3/ VirtIO
4/ FF-A (To cover this activity, as it falls rather between the gaps otherwise)
5/ Maintenance (to cover all the sub-groups, and co-ordinate the activity)

The plan, and purpose of the first meeting, is to start these groups of, get some chairs nominated, and have the sub-groups become operational over the next few weeks. We will then reconvene the wider group to make sure we’re all going in the right direction….

If you have ideas for other sub-groups, please let me know, or if you want to nominate yourself or your best friend as chair, equally let me know.

At this point, the expectation is that the sub groups will meet every other week or so, while the full WG might meet once a quarter or so. All this to be determined. Please let me know what you would prefer.

If you have ideas for subjects the sub-groups should work on, then that would be very helpful, below is a list of ideas to wet your appetite, in our first meeting we may identify some initial issues that the sub-working groups should start with.

* CPU emulation, reference platforms and other architectural features (e.g. GIC)
* QEMU Development support
- Expanding supported host support (MacOS, Windows on Arm, BSDs, ...)
- VirtIO GPU
- Other hypervisors (HVF, WHPX, Gunyah, others)
- Record/Replay
- linux-user
- "Single binary” (ARM+other)
- "Split accel" : (TCG and KVM /HVF/WHPX)
* Continue Virtio-msg upstreaming work, active under deemed sponsorship
- X86+Arm over PCI, for A-core to R-core, and for Virtio in Xen with real time and safety
* Automotive Support (Partitioning, RTOS, other automotive virtualization requirements)
* VirtIO
- support for other hypervisors
- additional devices (WiFi, NPUs, Cameras...)
- additional backends (rust-vmm, RTOS etc..)
- virtio-msg (new VirtIO transport for flexible use cases)
- virtio-msg via FFA for secure world and VM to VM comms
- virtio-msg via bus fabric (e.g. PCI, shared memory) for multi-soc deployment
- virtio-msg kernel UABI and rust-vmm user-space
- other deployment scenarios


Cheers,
Mark