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 BoF 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:
- vhost-user Specification Governance: Discuss official location for the vhost-user specification.
- Automotive Virtualization Requirements & Reference Platforms: Coordinate deployment needs across Automotive platforms [1]
- Real-time performance needs (camera, display, CAN)
- Status Update: Ongoing work on vhost-user device (virtio-Media, virtio-can, virtio-rtc, etc)[2][3]
- Graphics Stack Alignment: on roadmaps for shared dependencies like rutabaga_gfx across libkrun, crosvm, vhost-device-gpu [4]
- Shared Virtio Message-Parsing Crates: Evaluate creating unified Rust crates for Virtio device specs to share virtqueue parsing logic across backends and VMMs.
- Open questions about:
vhost-user Specification Refinements: Identify protocol gaps, missing features, and necessary standard improvements.
New Virtio/vhost-user Device Proposals.
[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