[one-users] OpennebulaBIOS : Cloud Computing Firmware

[Guillaume FORTAINE]

Misters,

Happy New Year to you,

Let me introduce myself : Guillaume FORTAINE, Engineer in Computer
Science. Me and my partners are currently working on a Cloud Computing 
Firmware.
( Virtual Hypervisor with virtual machine management software stack ) in
an Infrastructure-as-a-Service context.


To quote [0] :

"There's actually a lot to be said for the embedded hypervisor. Lots of IT
  environments--especially enterprise ones--do indeed have a mix of 
operating systems
  and operating system versions. Given that, there is indeed a lot to be 
said for the idea
  that hypervisors just come with the server as a sort of superset to 
the firmware,
like BIOS, already loaded on every system. Then IT administrators could 
just configure
any guest OSs they want on top."


After an analysis of the various solutions (Citrix, VMware, Microsoft & 
Red Hat), it seemed
natural to our eyes, to enable a true bare-metal hypervisor, to go as 
close as possible
to the hardware, hence the BIOS.

That's why we are currently going further since the first successful 
prototype
of the coreboot GSOC project AVATT (All Virtual All The Time) [1] [2].

This Google Summer of Code sponsored project suggested the idea
of implementing a Linux kernel with KVM (Kernel Virtual
Machine to provide Type I Hypervisor abilities to Linux) as a coreboot
payload (=Virtualization inside the BIOS).


The functional specifications of the Cloud Computing Firmware would be :

a) Smart (SLP + CIM + SSL/TLS)

b) Virtual Hypervisor (Linux + KVM + Virtio)

c) Virtualisation Management API (Opennebula)

We are already in discussion with several OEMs to have a convenient 
Hardware Platform
(especially with IOMMU [3] to provide high-performance I/O inside the 
virtual machines)


Our questions are fairly simple : As IT Professionals, would you 
appreciate to have an OpennebulaBIOS inside your Hardware ?

This is Firmware Engineering at the highest-level, not 'marketing fluff' 
like Citrix Xen for OEMs
or VMWare ESXi, because it would be the first true Bare-Metal Hypervisor 
in the World and
we definitely believe that it could revolutionize the industry.

We look forward to your answer,

Best Regards,

Guillaume FORTAINE

[0] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13556_3-10170884-61.html
[1] http://www.coreboot.org/AVATT
[2] http://www.slideshare.net/majeru/all-virtual-all-the-time
[3] 
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-pci-passthrough/index.html 

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