Speakers
Description
The vhost-user protocol started as a simple QEMU feature, but it has grown into a standard used across the entire Linux virtualization community. Today, it powers production workloads in the cloud (e.g. QEMU and cloud-hypervisor), lightweight environments like libkrun, and modern automotive systems.
However, as the ecosystem expands, we are hitting new "plumbing" bottlenecks. For example, the protocol specification is still stored inside the QEMU documentation, which makes it harder for other projects to participate in its growth. At the same time, automotive deployments are introducing strict new needs, such as safety certification, real-time performance, and long-term support, that impact everyone.
This microconference will bring developers and users together to address these challenges and other emerging topics across the ecosystem. Our goal is to establish better coordination, align technical roadmaps for both cloud and automotive, and build shared tests and tools to ensure all implementations work together.
Key Discussion Topics:
- Official location for the vhost-user specification
- Improvements needed to the vhost-user specification
- Integration testing infrastructure for vhost-user backends and multiple VMM frontends (QEMU, libkrun, cloud-hypervisor, crosvm)
- Automotive Virtualization Requirements and Reference Platform Coordination[1]
- Automotive Usecases: For example Android Automotive's use of crosvm and potential adoption of vhost-device backends; Red Hat Automotive's software-defined vehicle architecture using libkrun; and Panasonic Automotive's priorities for vhost-user implementations.
- Safety/certification requirements for vhost-user implementations
- Real-time performance needs (camera, display, CAN)
- Ongoing work on vhost-user device (virtio-Media, virtio-can, virtio-rtc, etc)[2][3]
- Graphics Stack Coordination: Discuss Roadmap decisions on rutabaga_gfx which is shared by crosvm, libkrun, and vhost-device-gpu [4]
- vDPA/VDUSE overlap with vhost-user protocol
- POSIX (or other OS) support for vhost-user implementations
[1] https://source.android.com/docs/automotive/virtualization/reference_platform
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/virtualization/ab2FlQTWUxl0KmlT@fedora/
[3] https://github.com/rust-vmm/vhost-device/pull/944
[4] https://github.com/magma-gpu/rutabaga_gfx/issues/24
Key Participants:
- Albert Esteve aesteve@redhat.com
- Stefano Garzarella sgarzare@redhat.com
- Sergio Lopez slp@redhat.com
- Manos Pitsidianakis manos.pitsidianakis@linaro.org
- Alex Bennee alex.bennee@linaro.org
- Matej Hrica mhrica@redhat.com
- Milan Zamazal mzamazal@redhat.com
- Gurchetan Singh gurchetansingh@google.com
- Jorge E. Moreira jemoreira@google.com
- Matias Vara Larsen mvaralar@redhat.com
- Dorinda Bassey dbassey@redhat.com
- Alberto Ruiz aruiz@redhat.com
- Erico Nunes ernunes@redhat.com
- John Ferlan jferlan@redhat.com
- Michael Tsirkin mst@redhat.com
- German Maglione gmaglion@redhat.com
- Stefan Hajnoczi stefanha@redhat.com
- Timos Ampelikiotis t.ampelikiotis@virtualopensystems.com
- Harald Mommer harald.mommer@oss.qualcomm.com