[Ovirt-devel] oVirtBIOS : (High-Performance) Virtualization Firmware
Guillaume FORTAINE
gfortaine at live.com
Sun Dec 27 16:28:17 UTC 2009
Dear Dennis,
> 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.
Our engineering solution comes from a real world problem : faulty
firmware (BIOS or UEFI) implementations prevent efficient I/O
Virtualization. To quote David Woodhouse, lead Intel embedded software
developer for the Linux Kernel and principal maintainer of the file
drivers/pci/intel-iommu.c [0] ( Intel's I/O Virtualization, to provide
high performance inside the virtual machines ) [1] :
"Well done, Dell and HP -- although I didn't think it was possible, you
have _further_ lowered my already-unprintable opinion of closed source
BIOSes and BIOS engineers"
"We _really_ need open source firmware.
Or at _least_ firmware written by competent engineers -- but I think
we've all fairly much given up on that happening by now?"
Many commits of the file intel-iommu.c are related to BIOS bugs [2] [3]
[4] [5] [6] [7].
And it is evident that Intel will not be able to test each firmware
version on each IOMMU capable Hardware.
By ensuring a full use of hardware capabilities inside Virtual Machines,
through a custom Virtualization Firmware, it lowers the TCO (Total Cost
of Ownership), thus requiring less frequent hardware upgrades that can
be substantial saves on a large scale volume or a critical requirement
for budget aware customers.
> 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.
We would greatly appreciate to invite you to a further reading of this
Phoronix article entitled : "KVM Virtualization Performance With Linux
2.6.31" [8] :
"The disk benchmarks took a large hit when running Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic
Koala" within a virtual machine using KVM, but that is to no surprise
considering the setup."
"Benchmarking Apache with the Kernel-based Virtual Machine took a huge
performance hit,"
Our engineering target is to achieve 1:1 parity in terms of performance
between real-hardware and a virtual machine.
Each product has specific needs that is why we are very pleased that you
were satisfied by your Virtualization Solution, to quote : "So we went
with RHEL Xen instead which works beautifully", however it will not be
the case for performance and budget aware customers.
Best Regards,
Guillaume FORTAINE
[0]
http://git.infradead.org/iommu-2.6.git/blob/e0fc7e0b4b5e69616f10a894ab9afff3c64be74e:/drivers/pci/intel-iommu.c
[1] http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/42841/
[2]
http://git.infradead.org/iommu-2.6.git/commit/e0fc7e0b4b5e69616f10a894ab9afff3c64be74e
[3]
http://git.infradead.org/iommu-2.6.git/commit/2ff729f5445cc47d1910386c36e53fc6b1c5e47a
[4]
http://git.infradead.org/iommu-2.6.git/commit/6ecbf01c7ce4c0f4c3bdfa0e64ac6258328fda6c
[5]
http://git.infradead.org/iommu-2.6.git/commit/5854d9c8d18359b1fc2f23c0ef2d51dd53281bd6
[6]
http://git.infradead.org/iommu-2.6.git/commit/86cf898e1d0fca245173980e3897580db38569a8
[7]
http://git.infradead.org/iommu-2.6.git/commit/0815565adfe3f4c369110c57d8ffe83caefeed68
[8] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_2631_kvm&num=6
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