Connor Davis, Software Engineer/Researcher at AIS, presented at the 2021 Xen Developer & Design Summit. This year’s virtual event took place on Tuesday, May 25 through Friday, May 28.
Abstract
The Root VM: A New Xen Domain Species
The Xen scheduler is a complex piece of code responsible for scheduling guest virtual machines and managing platform power. What if this complexity could be avoided by reusing the scheduler in a domU instead? This talk is a case study that discusses the benefits and costs of a scheduler-less Xen, in particular its effect on power, performance, emulation and PCI passthrough. This study is based on the opensource research implementation of the Xen PV interface in the MicroV hypervisor. The goal of this talk to raise awareness of this alternative architecture and to start a discussion on the possibility of bringing this alternative to upstream Xen.
About Connor Davis
Connor spends most of his time exploring virtualization technologies (in particular VT-x/VT-d), covert communications, embedded systems, secure boot architectures and Clang/LLVM. In his free time, he enjoys hiking, rock climbing and practicing Jiu Jitsu. He is also currently contributing to the port of Xen to RISC-V.
