Onboarding Resources

Various links to useful resources for learning about virtual machines and the technology behind crosvm.

Talks

Chrome University by zachr (2018, 30m)

• Life of a Crostini VM (user click -> terminal opens)
• All those French daemons (Concierge, Maitred, Garcon, Sommelier)

NYULG: Crostini by zachr / reveman (2018, 50m)

• Overlaps Chrome University talk
• More details on wayland / sommelier from reveman
• More details on crostini integration of app icons, files, clipboard
• Lots of demos

Introductory Resources

OS Basics

• OSDev Wiki (A lot of articles on OS development)
• PCI Enumeration (Most of our devices are on PCI, this is how they are found)
• ACPI Source Language Tutorial

Rust

• Rust Cheat Sheet Beautiful website with idiomatic rust examples, overview of pointer- and container types
• Rust Programming Tipz (with a z, that’s how you know it’s cool!)
• Rust design patterns repo
• Organized collection of blog posts on various Rust topics

KVM Virtualization

• Low-level tutorial on how to run code via KVM
• KVM Hello World sample program (host + guest)
• KVM API docs
• Awesome Virtualization (Definitely check out the Hypervisor Development section)

Virtio (device emulation)

• Good overview of virtio architecture from IBM
• Virtio drivers overview by RedHat
• Virtio specs (so exciting, I can’t stop reading)
• Basics of devices in QEMU

VFIO (Device passthrough)

• Introduction to PCI Device Assignment with VFIO

Virtualization History and Basics

• By the end of this section you should be able to answer the following questions
  • What problems do VMs solve?
  • What is trap-and-emulate?
  • Why was the x86 instruction set not “virtualizable” with just trap-and-emulate?
  • What is binary translation? Why is it required?
  • What is a hypervisor? What is a VMM? What is the difference? (If any)
  • What problem does paravirtualization solve?
  • What is the virtualization model we use with Crostini?
  • What is our hypervisor?
  • What is our VMM?
• CMU slides go over motivation, why x86 instruction set wasn’t “virtualizable” and the good old trap-and-emulate
• Why Intel VMX was needed; what does it do (Link)
• What is a VMM and what does it do (Link)
• Building a super simple VMM blog article (Link)

Relevant Specs

• ACPI Specs
• DeviceTree Specs
• Vhost-user protocol