SPLVM Virtualized System Meetup

Host: Mossaka

1. Community hosted meetup for discussing anything related to distributed systems, operating systems, database, and networking. Currently focusing on virtualization, tracking course UCSD CSE 291.
2. Schedule
3. Biweekly Zoom meeting on Monday at 5pm PDT
4. Code of Conduct
5. Please use “Raise Hands” feature on Zoom
6. Welcome to unmute or comment in chat at ANY TIME!

Overview

Hypervisors

• Type 1: hypervisor runs directly on the host machine’s hardware
  • e.x. Microsoft Hyper-V, Linux KVM, and VMWare ESXi
• Type 2: runs on top of host machine’s operating system
  • e.x. Oracle VirtulBox, VMWare Player, QEMU

KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine): is an open-source Linux kernel module that works on x86 hardware and makes Linux operating system behave like a Type-1 hypervisor, using hardware extensions (AMD-V, Intel VT).

QEMU (Quick Emulator): is an open-source, software-based system emulator. It supports emulating different target architectures such as ARM, SPARC, etc. Full target system emulation is performed using Dynamic Binary Translation (similar to VMWare). It is a Type-2 hypervisor, running in the user-space of Linux.

KVM is created on October 19th, 2006, by Avi Kivity (Co-founder and CTO of ScyllaDB), when Avi was at a Israeli startup Qumranet, later acquired by Red Hat by 2008. After acquisition, Red Hat switched from Xen to KVM hypervisor for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) since 6.0

QEMU is created on 2003 by Fabrice Bellard, a French programmer known for FFmpeg, QEMU and the Tiny C Compiler. His website is perfect.

What’s the relationship between kvm and QEMU?

To run x86-on-x86,

1. can use KVM as the main hypervisor (allows native execution of guest code (in guest mode))
2. calls QEMU for hardware device emulation where KVM cannot handle
   1. Keyboard, Mouse, Display, hard drive and NIC