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Misters,<br>
<br>
Happy New Year to you,<br>
<br>
Let me introduce myself : Guillaume FORTAINE, Engineer in Computer<br>
Science. Me and my partners are currently working on a Cloud Computing
Firmware.<br>
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<span class="Apple-style-span"
style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; font-size: medium;"><span
class="Apple-style-span"
style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span>( Virtual
Hypervisor with virtual machine management software stack ) in<br>
an Infrastructure-as-a-Service context.<br>
<br>
<br>
To quote [0] :<br>
<br>
"There's actually a lot to be said for the embedded hypervisor. Lots of
IT<br>
environments--especially enterprise ones--do indeed have a mix of
operating systems<br>
and operating system versions. Given that, there is indeed a lot to be
said for the idea<br>
that hypervisors just come with the server as a sort of superset to
the firmware, <br>
like BIOS, already loaded on every system. Then IT administrators could
just configure <br>
any guest OSs they want on top."<br>
<br>
<br>
After an analysis of the various solutions (Citrix, VMware, Microsoft
& Red Hat), it seemed <br>
natural to our eyes, to enable a true bare-metal hypervisor, to go as
close as possible <br>
to the hardware, hence the BIOS.<br>
<br>
That's why we are currently going further since the first successful
prototype <br>
of the coreboot GSOC project AVATT (All Virtual All The Time) [1] [2]. <br>
<br>
This Google Summer of Code sponsored project suggested the idea <br>
of implementing a Linux kernel with KVM (Kernel Virtual<br>
Machine to provide Type I Hypervisor abilities to Linux) as a coreboot<br>
payload (=Virtualization inside the BIOS).<br>
<br>
<br>
The functional specifications of the Cloud Computing Firmware would be :<br>
<br>
a) Smart (SLP + CIM + SSL/TLS)<br>
<br>
b) Virtual Hypervisor (Linux + KVM + Virtio)<br>
<br>
c) Virtualisation Management API (Opennebula)<br>
<br>
We are already in discussion with several OEMs to have a convenient
Hardware Platform <br>
(especially with IOMMU [3] to provide high-performance I/O inside the
virtual machines)<br>
<br>
<br>
Our questions are fairly simple : As IT Professionals, would you
appreciate to have an OpennebulaBIOS inside your Hardware ?<span
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class="Apple-style-span"
style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span
class="Apple-converted-space"></span><span
class="Apple-converted-space"></span></span></span><br>
<br>
This is Firmware Engineering at the highest-level, not 'marketing
fluff' like Citrix Xen for OEMs <br>
or VMWare ESXi, because it would be the first true Bare-Metal
Hypervisor in the World and <br>
we definitely believe that it could revolutionize the industry.<br>
<br>
We look forward to your answer,<br>
<br>
Best Regards,<br>
<br>
Guillaume FORTAINE<br>
<br>
[0] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13556_3-10170884-61.html">http://news.cnet.com/8301-13556_3-10170884-61.html</a><br>
[1] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.coreboot.org/AVATT">http://www.coreboot.org/AVATT</a><br>
[2] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.slideshare.net/majeru/all-virtual-all-the-time">http://www.slideshare.net/majeru/all-virtual-all-the-time</a><br>
[3]
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-pci-passthrough/index.html">http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-pci-passthrough/index.html</a>
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