Re: [Qemu-devel] About the light VM solution!

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Tue, Dec 5, 2017 at 1:35 PM, Paolo Bonzini <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 05/12/2017 13:06, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 05, 2017 at 02:33:13PM +0800, Yang Zhong wrote:
>>> As you know, AWS has decided to switch to KVM in their clouds. This news 
>>> make almost all
>>> china CSPs(clouds service provider) pay more attention on KVM/Qemu, 
>>> especially light VM
>>> solution.
>>>
>>> Below are intel solution for light VM, qemu-lite.
>>> http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/Light%20weight%20virtualization%20with%20QEMU%26KVM_0.pdf
>>>
>>> My question is whether community has some plan to implement light VM or 
>>> alternative solutions? If no, whether our
>>> qemu-lite solution is suitable for upstream again? Many thanks!
>>
>> What caused a lot of discussion and held back progress was the approach
>> that was taken.  The basic philosophy seems to be bypassing or
>> special-casing components in order to avoid slow operations.  This
>> requires special QEMU, firmware, and/or guest kernel binaries and causes
>> extra work for the management stack, distributions, and testers.
>
> I think having a special firmware (be it qboot or a special-purpose
> SeaBIOS) is acceptable.

The work Marc Mari Barcelo did in 2015 showed that SeaBIOS can boot
guests quickly.  The guest kernel was entered in <35 milliseconds
IIRC.  Why is special firmware necessary?

I'm not against additional binaries if there's no other way, but it's
important to demonstrate why special-casing is necessary.