The "Jailhouse" hypervisor [LWN.net]

The Jailhouse project has announced its existence. Jailhouse is a Linux-native hypervisor like KVM, but with a focus on minimalism and isolation of virtual machines on dedicated CPUs. "Jailhouse is a partitioning hypervisor that can create asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) setups on Linux-based systems. That means it runs bare-metal applications or non-Linux OSes aside a standard Linux kernel on one multicore hardware platform. Jailhouse ensures isolation between these 'cells', as we call them, via hardware-assisted virtualization. The typical workloads we expect to see in non-Linux cells are applications with highly demanding real-time, safety or security requirements." The project is in an early stage and looking for interested developers.

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The "Jailhouse" hypervisor

Posted Nov 21, 2013 9:07 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (1 responses)

If I understand correctly what this is, it seems like a very exciting development.

The "Jailhouse" hypervisor

Posted Nov 22, 2013 23:59 UTC (Fri) by jcorgan (subscriber, #47213) [Link]

This also might pave the way for using a core on an otherwise SMP machine as a coprocessor, running low-level native code instead of an OS.

The "Jailhouse" hypervisor

Posted Nov 29, 2013 3:40 UTC (Fri) by ratheesh.ksz (guest, #94226) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a video on you tube by Jan kiszka explaining slides. But sound quality is very bad , i find it very difficult to follow.

Could any body upload a quality video and share link ?

I may sound stupid. I have a basic question. If linux loaded first , How can it give way for another hypervisor to take control and reliquish some of the CPU control to another bare metal OS ?

The "Jailhouse" hypervisor

Posted Nov 30, 2013 8:26 UTC (Sat) by jki (subscriber, #68176) [Link]

As far as I remember, there was only this single recording. Several talks suffered from this suboptimal microphone setup (Bluetooth headset).

Regarding your technical question: In order to give control over the CPU virtualization features to Jailhouse, Linux must not use these features at that time as well. More precisely, KVM must not be in use when you want to enable Jailhouse.

Conceptually, the steps to enable Jailhouse while Linux is running are similar to activating KVM in order to create a virtual machine. The difference is that KVM will continue to run Linux at the same privilege level as the hypervisor core while Jailhouse will resume Linux in guest mode.