Linux Plumbers Conf 2013

One Line Summary

Abstract

As of recently we have the VFIO framework in Linux which gives us a nice abstraction layer for PCI devices, so that any user space program (like QEMU) can drive a PCI card, should the machine administrator allow this.

We want to allow the same for platform devices – devices that are not driven by PCI. You can commonly find these types of devices in embedded hardware, such as ARM or PowerPC SoCs.

There are a few complications going along with platform devices, such as device enumeration, hardware constraints and device tree bindings.

This discussion is about outstanding issues of platform device VFIO, where they are, how they can be solved and ultimately how to rule the world.

Tags

ARM, qemu, kvm, powerpc, VFIO

Presentation Materials

Speaker

• Alexander Graf

  Biography

  Alexander started working for SUSE about 6 years ago. Since then he worked on fancy things like mkinitrd, SUSE Studio, QEMU, KVM and openSUSE on ARM.

  Whenever something really useful comes to his mind, he tends to implement it. Among others he did Mac OS X virtualization using KVM, nested SVM, KVM on PowerPC and a lot of work in QEMU for openSUSE on ARM. He is the upstream maintainer of KVM for PowerPC, QEMU for PowerPC and QEMU for S390x. As a side project, he is also involved in openSUSE on ARM.

  Sessions

  • * Platform Device VFIO
    • Title: Platform Device VFIO
    • Microconference: Virtualization
    • One Line Summary:

      Passing non-PCI devices into guests and allow for user space device drivers

    • slides
    • Speakers: Alexander Graf