Ovirt devel - Dec 2009 - oVirtBIOS : Virtualization Firmware

Misters,

Let me introduce myself : Guillaume FORTAINE, Engineer in Computer
Science. Me and my partners are currently working on a Virtualization 
Firmware.

After an analysis of the various solutions (Citrix, VMware and 
Microsoft), it seemed
natural to our eyes, to enable a true bare-metal hypervisor, to go as 
close as possible
to the hardware, hence the BIOS.

That's why we are currently going further since the first successful 
prototype
of the coreboot GSOC project AVATT (All Virtual All The Time) [1] [2].

Coreboot is an open source hardware initialization firmware. It does
some basic hardware init, then hands over control to one of many
possible payloads.

This Google Summer of Code sponsored project suggested the idea
of implementing a Linux kernel with KVM (Kernel Virtual
Machine to provide Type I Hypervisor abilities to Linux) as a coreboot
payload (=Virtualization inside the BIOS).

In a second step, we plan to put also oVirt as virtual machine management
software stack to have an Enterprise-Grade Virtualization Firmware.

However, we would greatly appreciate to ask you a few questions and
we would greatly appreciate that you enlighten us, if possible, please.

1) Would it be possible to have an oVirt From Scratch ?

To quote [3] :

"Image building is heavily based on Fedora-ish features like kickstart and
livecd-creator, this will be significant effort to port to equivalent 
Debian tools."


2) Would it fit in 32 MBytes, without a kernel, by tuning the build process
(eGlibc [4] + ruby-mini [5] + Gcc -Os + Lzma for rootfs) ?


3) Do we need a writeable Flash chip ?


4) What would be the needed Red Hat resources (time/people/funding) to 
fulfil
the above requests and to complete the Roadmap [6]
to have an Enterprise-Grade oVirt Stack ?


5) And to conclude, our last and most important question : as IT 
Professionals,
would you appreciate to have an oVirtBIOS inside your Hardware ?

To quote [7] :

"There's actually a lot to be said for the embedded hypervisor. Lots of
IT
  environments--especially enterprise ones--do indeed have a mix of 
operating systems
  and operating system versions. Given that, there is indeed a lot to be 
said for the idea
  that hypervisors just come with the server as a sort of superset to 
the firmware,
like BIOS, already loaded on every system. Then IT administrators could 
just configure
any guest OSs they want on top."


One of my partner has already done a successful Linux + KVM BIOS 
prototype and
to include oVirt is the logical next step.

We are already in discussion with several OEMs to have a convenient 
Hardware Platform
(especially with IOMMU [8] to provide high-performance I/O inside the 
virtual machines)

This is Firmware Engineering at the highest-level, not 'marketing fluff'
like Citrix Xen for OEMs
or VMWare ESXi, because it would be the first true Bare-Metal Hypervisor 
in the World and
we definitely believe that it could revolutionize the industry.


Merry Christmas,

We look forward to your answer,

Best Regards,

Guillaume FORTAINE

[1] http://www.coreboot.org/AVATT
[2] http://www.slideshare.net/majeru/all-virtual-all-the-time
[3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/ovirt-devel/2009-September/msg00107.html
[4] http://www.eglibc.org
[5] https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/packages/lang/ruby
[6] http://ovirt.et.redhat.com/milestones.html
[7] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13556_3-10170884-61.html
[8] 
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-pci-passthrough/index.html
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On 12/26/2009 11:17 AM, Guillaume FORTAINE wrote:

[ SNIP]
>
> This is Firmware Engineering at the highest-level, not 'marketing
fluff'
> like Citrix Xen for OEMs
> or VMWare ESXi, because it would be the first true Bare-Metal Hypervisor
> in the World and
> we definitely believe that it could revolutionize the industry.
Why should I care? Don't get me wrong the idea sound interesting but I 
don't really see why it is so vitally important to put the HV right into 
the BIOS. The problem is that you loose support for a lot of hardware that 
cannot be booted with coreboot.
Earlier this year we had to come up with a virtualization solution to host 
80 VMs quickly and our first shot was VMWare ESX but that failed because 
ESX refused to work with the commodity hardware we were using. So we went 
with RHEL Xen instead which works beautifully on pretty much any system 
precisely because it isn't so closely wedded to any particular hardware.
I think using a regular BIOS that boots a minimal Kernel/Initrd from a 
flash chip gives you pretty much the same benefits of a tiny footprint but 
actually works with pretty much every machine out there.

Regards,
   Dennis