Alex Bennée

VirtIO HALs and other abstractions

In a world of isolated workloads VirtIO provides an efficient mechanism for emulating HW. Although originally designed for Linux and KVM, Linaro's Project Stratos envisages a series of portable backends supporting a range of device types on multiple hypervisors. This talk will give an overview of how VirtIO works, the key interfaces required and the work done to date. We shall also look at various deployment architectures and discuss some of the challenges still to be addressed.

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Biography

Alex started learning to program in the 80s in an era of classic home computers that allowed you to get down and dirty at the system level. After graduating with a degree in Chemistry he’s worked on a variety of projects including Fruit Machines, Line Cards, CCTV recorders and point-to-multipoint wireless microwave systems. Since the turn of the century his primary focus has been working with FLOSS platforms, especially Linux. For the last eight years he’s been working at Linaro helping improve QEMU’s emulation features. A keen Emacs user he will happily answer questions and proselytise for the One True Editor (tm).