GSoC'20 Interested Student: Adding support to Jailhouse Hypervisor

[Jan Kiszka]

Hi Prakhar,

On 25.03.20 05:36, PRAKHAR BANSAL wrote:
> Hi Jan,
>
> Thanks for the reply. I looked deeper into the libvirt and Jailhouse
> source code and found following two things that seem relevant to the
> project I am interested in.
>
> - Libvirt driver interface at [libvirt.git]
> <https://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git;a=tree;hb=HEAD> / src
> <https://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git;a=tree;f=src;hb=HEAD> / driver.h
> <https://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git;a=blob_plain;f=src/driver.h;hb=HEAD>
> - Jailhouse tool, which is using the ioctl API of the Jailhouse,
> available at
> https://github.com/siemens/jailhouse/blob/master/tools/jailhouse.c.
>
> With the help of the above two, it looks like, a libvirt driver for the
> Jailhouse can be implemented. Let me know if I am moving in the right
> direction so far.

 From the Jailhouse perspective, it is important to not consider the
command line tool an interface anymore (like in the first prototype) but
build on top of the Linux driver API (ioctls, sysfs). There is already a
Python library which started to abstract this interface for
Jailhouse-internal use cases. However, I strongly suspect libvirt will
rather want a native binding.

>
> I have been looking at the other libvirt driver implementations for
> hypervisors like HyperV and VMware to understand their implementation
> and learn from there.

As Jailhouse is a static partitioning hypervisor without abstraction of
the underlying hardware, your starting point for the libvirt binding
should be a given set of Jailhouse cell configurations describing a
complete partitioned system. So rather than instantiating on demand a
domain (Jailhouse cell) with, say, a network adapter, the driver should
match a user request for a domain against the configuration set and use
what is there - or report the mismatch. What it could organize, though,
is interconnecting cells that have a (preconfigured) virtual network
link to the root cell.

Due to this different concept, there will be no 1:1 mapping for
commodity hypervisor drivers to the Jailhouse scenario. Still, studying
what they do is useful and needed in order to understand what "normally"
happens and find a reasonable translation. This is probably the most
challenging part of the project.

Jan