LWN: Comments on "Bao: a lightweight static partitioning hypervisor"

What's three orders of magnitude among friends?

corbet — Fri, 29 May 2020 13:52:08 +0000

Oops...I even had that right in my notes, but somehow messed up when putting it into the article. Fixed now, apologies for the mistake.

Bao: a lightweight static partitioning hypervisor

josemartins — Fri, 29 May 2020 13:50:22 +0000

thank you for the article, Jonathan! However, I have a small correction. The hypervisor, for the example configuration I was talking about, is actually 50KB, not 50MB.

Bao: a lightweight static partitioning hypervisor

glenn — Thu, 21 May 2020 23:27:34 +0000

Sel4 is great, but it has limitations. It's unable to support multi-socket/NUMA systems, for instance. This is an intentional design choice on the part of Sel4's developers.

RISC-V H-ext

bjorntopel — Wed, 20 May 2020 20:11:08 +0000

The hypervisor extension is in pretty good shape. The WDC folks has been working on the QEMU/KVM port for quite some time. The latest version can be found here [1]. The spec has been getting a lot of input from KVM maintainer Paolo Bonzini, e.g. [2], which has been added to the specification. In RISC-V land a spec doesn't get ratified until there's silicon to support it.

Hopefully, we'll get a chip soon! :-)

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-riscv/20200428073312.324684...
[2] https://groups.google.com/a/groups.riscv.org/forum/m/#!ms...

Muen?

justincormack — Wed, 20 May 2020 18:30:13 +0000

Muen is another static separation kernel https://muen.sk/ which is formally verified. Currently x86 only although there has been some arm work AFAIK.

Bao: a lightweight static partitioning hypervisor

bittonye — Wed, 20 May 2020 17:55:47 +0000

Why not use Sel4 with Camkes VM? (https://docs.sel4.systems/projects/virtualization/)

Bao: a lightweight static partitioning hypervisor

Sesse — Wed, 20 May 2020 16:38:57 +0000

So now, we have Boa, a lightweight web server with only one thread, and Bao, a lightweight hypervisor with only one user per thread? :-)