Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

This week I am at the USENIX Federated Conferences Week in lovely Portland, Oregon. Yesterday Orna and I walked back and forth through Portland, today I am at the 3rd Workshop on I/O Virtualization and tomorrow I will be at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference.

I am wearing multiple hats this week. Earlier this morning I presented our work on “SplitX: Split Guest/Hypervisor Execution on Multi-core”, and Abel Gordon presented our work on “VAMOS: Virtualization Aware Middleware”. Both presentations went well, if I might say so myself. Nadav Amit will present our work on “vIOMMU: Efficient IOMMU Emulation” tomorrow — if his flight makes it here in time. I will also participate in a panel on challenges in cloud I/O later today, will be chairing a session on Friday, and will be summarizing several sessions for ;login today and tomorrow.

I like being here at USENIX ATC and WIOV; the topics are close to my heart and the halls are full of familiar faces. It is also good, however, to step outside of one’s comfort zone every so often. Accordingly I agreed to serve on the technical program committee for SPSN ’11: The First International Workshop on Security and Privacy in Social Networks. This should be interesting.

Last but not least, a journey that started almost two years ago reached its end — at least the end of the beginning — recently when Marcelo Tosatti applied the nested VMX patchset to the KVM tree. Kudos to Nadav Har’El who took a bunch of research code (in both the best and worst senses of the term) and continuously polished and rewrote it until it finally conformed to the highest standards of open source development. Thanks to Nadav’s tireless efforts, nested virtualization on Intel machines will soon be available on every KVM deployment near you.