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 This contains just some minutes.  Main project page here.

September 18, 2018

Participants:

• Anup Patel (XVisor)
• Nikola Velinov (Green Hills)
• Subramanian (Alpine)
• Artem Mygaiev (EPAM)
• Vasco Fachin (ADIT)
• Gunnar (GENIVI)
• Alex Agizim (EPAM)
• Bernhard Rill (ARM)
• Dmitry Morozov (OpenSynergy)
• Devendra T (KPIT)

Apologies:

• Philippe R
• Kai Lampka
• Matti (Opensynergy)
  
  

Agenda:

• XVisor introduction
• Tech Summit
• Sensors (if time)

Minutes:

• Some introductions.
  • Devendra joining from KPIT.
  • (later) Alex from EPAM
  • Anup: I work at Qualcomm as a server virtualization engineer.  XVisor is a side project.
    
    
  XVisor introduction:
  
  
• Anup: Hobby project at first (~2010). Could we run more than one RTOS on the CPU? Played around with minimal scheduler and were excited when it started to work.  It grew into this project.
  ... Interested in providing the minmial possible scheduling, avoiding complexity
  ... PowerPC first, then tried also MIPS
  ...Availability of hardware was a concern. Started with ARM eventually.
  ...Now we have ports for supporting the virtualization extensions.
• Gunnar: considered Intel support?
• Anup: Yes we have it - another person working on that but not me personally
• Anup: We also have some support for ARM architectures without built-in virtualization features. We patch the kernel, to remove certain "problematic" instructions with a hyper-call. So with some modification we can run RTOS and Linux on hardware w/o virt support. Not as good performance of course but still cool!
• Anup: Most people are familiar with Type-1/Type-2. But the word "Monolithic" might need clarification.
• Anup Walking through New/extended classification scheme. Details beyond the "Type 1/2" definition.
• Gunnar: Do the rest of you agree with the classification? It would be interesting to see other missing hypervisors categorized as well.
• Anup: We support VIRTIO for paravirt. Can remove drivers if not required, or create hybrid approach where some are pass-through
• Anup (presenting Xen slide)
• Artem: Not quite, backends will be in dom0 and in this case Qemu is not needed. But if you really want to use emulation then emulators will run on the hypervisor level.
• ...There are also peripheral emulators that can run on Xen level. Information in research paper from 2 years ago: running device drivers in Xen as a privileged application.
• ...You can go into privileged mode, effiectively switching back to ... directly run on execution level zero. Any type of emulator. Potentially unsafe device drivers can be run here. In most cases if you talk about PV model only then the picture is correct.
• ...Alternative, backend talks to backend with its own device driver model then QEmu not needed.
• Gunnar, discussing working session
• ... XVisor details and Q&A?
• Anup: I could prepare a few interesting questions. Memory handling...
• Gunnar: Security topic. I also think the task scheduling challenge is (forever) interesting.
• ... ARM TrustZone whitepaper
• Bernhard: There are ARM engineers that can introduce this. Just give me a more preciese time slot.
• Gunnar: Good.  Since we have many virtual participants and the logistics of a large room can be difficult, it's important that we organize the working sessions around a few presentations.
• Nikola: I would also like a more detailed time schedule
• Gunnar: Sure I can set that up, but remember you all need to provide input (topics) to actually create it.
• Gunnar: Are you familiar with ACRN?  We have not done any deep-dive into it on this project yet but I think we should at some point.  I think it's Intel only, but also follows a minimalist approach.  Might be worth for you to look at.
• Anup mentioning paper(s) behind XVisor.  Links will be sent to mailing list.  
  ...There is also a paper on TrustZone usage.
• Gunnar: That fits well since ARM presented TrustZone information to us recently.
• Gunnar: If you have additional topics for working session you can make a short intro - send me that proposal!

September 11, 2018

Participants:

• Kai (Elektrobit)
• Nikola (GHS)
• Sang Bum (Perseus)
• Subramanian (Alpine)
• Matti (Opensynergy)
• Christoph (ADIT)
• Vasco Fachin (ADIT)
• Gunnar (GENIVI)
• Philippe (GENIVI)

...