Effective Virtual CPU Configuration with QEMU and libvirt
QEMU (the open source machine emulator and virtualizer) and the libvirt API allow a variety of ways in which CPUs can be configured for virtual machines (VMs). In light of the recent CPU hardware flaw …
| Talk Title | Effective Virtual CPU Configuration with QEMU and libvirt |
| Speakers | Kashyap Chamarthy (Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat) |
| Conference | Open Source Summit + ELC Europe |
| Conf Tag | |
| Location | Edinburgh, UK |
| Date | Oct 21-25, 2018 |
| URL | Talk Page |
| Slides | Talk Slides |
| Video | |
QEMU (the open source machine emulator and virtualizer) and the libvirt API allow a variety of ways in which CPUs can be configured for virtual machines (VMs). In light of the recent CPU hardware flaws, it is becoming increasingly difficult to choose an effective CPU configuration. In this presentation, we will walk through the distinct CPU configuration interfaces QEMU offers, and in turn, how the libvirt project uses those interfaces to provide convenient APIs for higher-level applications. We will also consider critical needs such as the ability to live migrate a VM across hosts with a diverse set of CPUs; or the flexibility to add or remove specific CPU features from a guest CPU model, to mitigate various hardware CPU flaws. The talk will be set in context such that developers and users of higher-level management software (e.g. OpenStack Nova) will, hopefully, gain an appreciation for the details.
