Virtualization Technologies

This is the home page for the "Virtualization Technologies" course. Here, you will find (in a badly-organised form) all the material, slides, and information needed to attend the course

Lessons:

• First lesson: 2020/02/14, 9:30 -> 12:00
  • Introduction to the course
  • Videos (in Italian): first part and second part
• Second lesson: 2020/02/21, 9:30 -> 12:00
  • Virtual Machines
  • Videos (in Italian): first part and second part
• Third lesson: 2020/02/28, 9:30 -> 12:00
  • Virtual Machines --- Again
  • Video (in Italian)
• Fourth lesson: 2020/03/09, 9:30 -> 12:00
  • Input/Output Virtualization
  • Videos (in Italian): first part and second part
• Fift lesson: 2020/03/16, 9:30 -> 12:00
  • Something more about containers
  • Video (in Italian)
• Sixth lesson: 2020/03/23, 9:30 -> 12:00
  • Something about Real-Time Virtual Machines
  • Videos (in Italian): first part, second part and third part
• Seventh lesson: 2020/03/30, 9:30 -> 12:00
  • Real-Time virtual machines with multiple virtual CPUs
  • Videos (in Italian): first part and second part
• Eighth lesson: 2020/04/06, 9:30 -> 12:00
  • Introduction to UniKernels
  • Some other presentations about UniKernels:
    • Slides about the OSv unikernel
    • Slides about unikernels
    • Slides about unikernel hypervisors
    • Slides about unikernels for nfv
  • Few words about devices passthrough

Project Ideas:

Remember: before starting to work on a project, contact me for details.

• Write a simple and minimalistic hypervisor for x86_64 or ARM using a programming language at your choice (WARNING! The hypervisor does not need to be complete; it just needs to show that you understood the basic virtualization technologies). You can use trap and emulate or hardware assisted virtualization, at your choice. If you also attended the Safe System Programming course, you can write it in Rust: it will count for both the courses.
• Write a minimalistic VM based on KVM, using a programming language at your choice. Implement only few simple devices (invented by you or based on virtio). If you also attended the Safe System Programming course, you can write it in Rust: it will count for both the courses.
• Implement some simple container runtime, as described in the course (and as better detailed here --- this tutorial is based on python, but you should use C, C++ or similar). If you also attended the Safe System Programming course, you can write it in Rust: it will count for both the courses.
• Perform some experiments with multi-processor real-time virtual machines. You can try to verify existing schedulability tests, or you can work on schedulability analysis, or you can try to implement global scheduling in the guest in a correct way
• Experimentally evaluate the real-time performance of (single-processor and multi-processor) virtual machines, considering both scheduling and latencies
• Run some experiments with unikernels
• Write a simple Linux kernel modules that activates VT-x (or some form of hardware-assisted virtualization) and tries to run the host Linux kernel in non-root mode (something like vbh or similar). Enable EPT (or similar technologies) if possible.

Examples:

• Example about trap and emulate
• Simple example about using KVM
  • Improve the example to show how to handle I/O: diff for the KVM test and guest doing some output
• Examples about containers:
  • Simple rootfs for tests
  • How to escape a chroot?
  • Simple minimalistic quasi-container

Links:

• The ukvm unikernel hypervisor has been renamed to solo5-hvt