<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> </head> <body text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff"> Misters, Let me introduce myself : Guillaume FORTAINE, Engineer in Computer Science. Me and my partners are currently working on a Virtualization Firmware. After an analysis of the various solutions (Citrix, VMware and Microsoft), it seemed natural to our eyes, to enable a true bare-metal hypervisor, to go as close as possible to the hardware, hence the BIOS. That's why we are currently going further since the first successful prototype of the coreboot GSOC project AVATT (All Virtual All The Time) [1] [2]. Coreboot is an open source hardware initialization firmware. It does some basic hardware init, then hands over control to one of many possible payloads. <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; font-size: medium;">This Google Summer of Code sponsored project suggested the idea of implementing a Linux kernel with KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine to provide Type I Hypervisor abilities to Linux) as a coreboot payload (=Virtualization inside the BIOS). In a second step, we plan to put also oVirt as <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; font-size: medium;"> virtual machine management software stack to have an Enterprise-Grade Virtualization Firmware. However, we would greatly appreciate to ask you a few questions and we would greatly appreciate that you enlighten us, if possible, please. 1) Would it be possible to have an oVirt From Scratch ? To quote [3] : "Image building is heavily based on Fedora-ish features like kickstart and livecd-creator, this will be significant effort to port to equivalent Debian tools." 2) Would it fit in 32 MBytes, without a kernel, by tuning the build process (eGlibc [4] + ruby-mini [5] + Gcc -Os + Lzma for rootfs) ? 3) Do we need a writeable Flash chip ? 4) What would be the needed Red Hat resources (time/people/funding) to fulfil the above requests and to complete the Roadmap [6] to have an Enterprise-Grade oVirt Stack ? 5) And to conclude, our last and most important question : as IT Professionals, would you appreciate to have an oVirtBIOS inside your Hardware ? To quote [7] : "There's actually a lot to be said for the embedded hypervisor. Lots of IT environments--especially enterprise ones--do indeed have a mix of operating systems and operating system versions. Given that, there is indeed a lot to be said for the idea that hypervisors just come with the server as a sort of superset to the firmware, like BIOS, already loaded on every system. Then IT administrators could just configure any guest OSs they want on top." One of my partner has already done a successful Linux + KVM BIOS prototype and to include oVirt is the logical next step. We are already in discussion with several OEMs to have a convenient Hardware Platform (especially with IOMMU [8] to provide high-performance I/O inside the virtual machines) This is Firmware Engineering at the highest-level, not 'marketing fluff' like Citrix Xen for OEMs or VMWare ESXi, because it would be the first true Bare-Metal Hypervisor in the World and we definitely believe that it could revolutionize the industry. Merry Christmas, We look forward to your answer, Best Regards, Guillaume FORTAINE [1] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.coreboot.org/AVATT">http://www.coreboot.org/AVATT</a> [2] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.slideshare.net/majeru/all-virtual-all-the-time">http://www.slideshare.net/majeru/all-virtual-all-the-time</a> [3] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.redhat.com/archives/ovirt-devel/2009-September/msg00107.html">https://www.redhat.com/archives/ovirt-devel/2009-September/msg00107.html</a> [4] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.eglibc.org">http://www.eglibc.org</a> [5] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/packages/lang/ruby">https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/packages/lang/ruby</a> [6] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://ovirt.et.redhat.com/milestones.html">http://ovirt.et.redhat.com/milestones.html</a> [7] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13556_3-10170884-61.html">http://news.cnet.com/8301-13556_3-10170884-61.html</a> [8] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-pci-passthrough/index.html">http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-pci-passthrough/index.html</a> </body> </html>