...
Talk to your colleagues/experts in each area (not virtualization experts necessarily, but subject experts). Make them part of prioritization activity, have them tell us if they would like to attend a specific deep-dive on a topic.
= participant favorites so far
Hardware/virtual devices:
- Crypto Crypto / Security
- Trusted Execution Environments
- NXP accelerator blocks?
- Ethernet Ethernet AvB / Time Sensitive Networking
- NXP accelerator blocks?
- Automotive networks, in particular CAN
- Accelerators
- Tensor Tensor-Processing Units
- Will be used for some safety critical features. Is it feasible to virtualize?
- DSPs (is that discussion done in AVPS or is there more?)
- Tensor
- Camera
- PCI
- used for example for inter-chip communication and peripherals
- Automotive working group exists within PCI v6 work
- Future Future interconnects: CCIX (pronounced :C-six"), CXL, Gen Z and other alternatives, NVidia alternative, ...
- Graphics (again...)
Platforms and environments
- Google's Trout platform (likely subdivided into areas of interest)
- Virtualization Virtualization for Microcontrollers / small cores
...
- CPU scheduling reporting HV<->VM, e.g. kernels do not get accurate information about system load. Steal time reporting. The time while a VM was not scheduled, even though it should run (= Steal time).
- IPC
- Communication between different guests. Does it affect the Virtual Platform or is it just run transparently on virtual socket?
- One specific use case is inter-cpu communication. Particularly in the case of converged SoCs, e.g. comms between app on RT and general purpose CPU.
- Are there standard choices? Are there many vendor-specific proposals, like IC-COM?
- Go through operating system kernel special needs for each popular OS choice.
- e.g. RTOS support? (VIRTIO might not apply? Or does it?)
- Clock synchronization, real-time clock abstraction (probably a good topic for the AVPS)
- Discussed today for the purpose of synchronized logs... but are not there more reasons? E.g. systems that can do load-balancing, redundancy (offloading, transferring tasks), don't they need a common time?
- Timer paravirtualization
- Solution to steal time issue.
- A spec from Arm ("Arm para-virtualized time" DEN0057A ) covers how to report steal time.
- General topic: Needs for (easier, better) virtualization support in future SoCs.
- Still examples of how IP-block diversity and limitations causes issues (32 bit device in an otherwise 64-bit architecture)
- Is virtualization truly a top priority for SoC vendors?
- Agreed definition of virtualization. Non-MMU systems seem to use the term even if the implementation is rather hardware separation.
Analyzing virtual platform characteristics and general areas
...
Bernard (Arm) on various topics, including CCIX, CXL
Ask Linaro representatives