We’d like to announce the availability of the QEMU 9.0.0 release. This release contains 2700+ commits from 220 authors. You can grab the tarball from our download page. The full list of changes are available in the changelog. Highlights include: block: virtio-blk now supports multiqueue where different queues of a single disk can be processed by different I/O threads gdbstub: various improvements such as catching syscalls in user-mode, support for fork-follow modes, and support for siginfo:read memory: preallocation of memory backends can now be handled concurrently using multiple threads in ..read more

During my work on SBSA Reference Platform I have spent lot of time in firmware’s code. Which mostly meant Tianocore EDK2 as Trusted Firmware is quite small. Writing all those ACPI tables by hand takes time. So I checked ConfigurationManager component which can do it for me. Introduction In 2018 Sami Mujawar from Arm contributed Dynamic Tables Framework to Tianocore EDK2 project. The goal was to have code which generates all ACPI tables from all those data structs describing hardware which EDK2 already has. In 2023 I was writing code for IORT and GTDT tables to generate them from ..read more

During last weeks we worked on getting rid of DeviceTree from EDK2 on SBSA Reference Platform. And finally we managed! All code is merged into upstream EDK2 repository. What? Someone may wonder where DeviceTree was in SBSA Reference Platform. Wasn’t it UEFI and ACPI platform? Yes, from Operating System point of view it is UEFI and ACPI. But if you look deeper you will see DeviceTree hidden inside our chain of software components: /dts-v1/; / { machine-version-minor = <0x03>; machine-version-major = <0x00>; #size-cells = <0x02> ..read more

Programming languages currently offer few defences against supply chain attacks where a malicious third-party library compromises a program. As I write this, the open source community is trying to figure out the details of the xz-utils backdoor, but there is a long history of supply chain attacks. High profile incidents have made plain the danger of shipping software built from large numbers dependencies, many of them unaudited and under little scrutiny for malicious code. In this post I will share ideas on future supply chain safe programming languages. Supply Chain Safe Programming Languages ..read more

Recently people asked me how to run SBSA Reference Platform for their own testing and development. Which shows that I should write some documentation. But first let me blog about it… Requirements To run SBSA Reference Platform emulation you need: QEMU (8.2+ recommended) EDK2 firmware files That’s all. Sure, some hardware resources would be handy but everyone has some kind of computer available, right? QEMU Nothing special is required as long as you have qemu-system-aarch64 binary available. EDK2 We provide EDK2 binaries on CodeLinaro server. Go to “latest/e ..read more

The certificates of the host key signing keys that are needed to verify host key documents will expire on April 24, 2024 for IBM z15 and LinuxONE III and on March 29, 2024 for IBM z16 and LinuxONE 4. Due to a requirement from the Certificate Authority (DigiCert), the renewed certificates are equipped with a new Locality value (“Armonk” instead of “Poughkeepsie”). These renewed certificates cause the current versions of the genprotimg, pvattest, and pvsecret tools to fail the verification of host key documents. The IBM Z team is preparing updates of the genprotimg, pvattest, and pvsecret tools ..read more

KubeVirt makes it possible to run virtual machines on Kubernetes alongside container workloads. Virtual machines are configured using VirtualMachineInstance YAML. But under the hood of KubeVirt lies the same libvirt tooling that is commonly used to run KVM virtual machines on Linux. Accessing libvirt can be convenient for development and troubleshooting. Note that bypassing KubeVirt must be done carefully. Doing this in production may interfere with running VMs. If a feature is missing from KubeVirt, then please request it. The following diagram shows how the user's VirtualMachineInstance is t ..read more

A vDPA device is a type of device that follows the virtio specification for its datapath but has a vendor-specific control path. vDPA devices can be both physically located on the hardware or emulated by software. A small vDPA parent driver in the host kernel is required only for the control path. The main advantage is the unified software stack for all vDPA devices: vhost interface (vhost-vdpa) for userspace or guest virtio driver, like a VM running in QEMU virtio interface (virtio-vdpa) for bare-metal or containerized applications running in the host management interface (vdpa netlink) for ..read more

Some time ago was a day when I reached “ten” years at Linaro. Why “”? Because it was 3 + 7 rather than 10 years straight. First three years as Canonical contractor now seven years at Red Hat employee assigned as Member Engineer. My first three years at Linaro NewCo or NewCore? Or Ubuntu on ARM? In 2010 I signed contract with Canonical as “Foundation OS Engineer”. Once there I signed another paper which moved me to NewCo project (also called NewCore but NewCo name is on paper I signed). On 30th April 2010 I got “Welcome to Linaro” e-mail. Then UDS-M happened where we were hi ..read more

File systems and relational databases are like cousins. They share more than is apparent at first glance. It's not immediately obvious that relational databases and file systems rely upon the same underlying concept. That underlying concept is the key-value store and this article explores how both file systems and databases can be implemented on top of key-value stores. The key-value store interface Key-value stores provide an ordered map data structure. A map is a data structure that supports storing and retrieving from a collection of pairs. It's called a map because it is like a mathematic ..read more