[2019] A Lightweight Virtual Interrupt Controller for Container|Serverless by Jing Liu & Chao Peng

On x86 platforms, interrupts are configured and delivered to operating system through either the interrupt controllers(e.g. PIC/APIC) or MSI/MSI-X. Similarly for virtualized x86 system, the same set of technologies are used. However, this is not fundamentally required and for some light weight virtualization usages like Kata Containers and Firecracker, which mainly focus on virtio devices and even MSI/MSI-X is not included due to complexity of PCI, the existing interrupt controllers and interrupt handling flow in both host and guest sides are over-killed. We prototyped a new virtual and simplified interrupt controller which fits current kernel interrupt framework well and meanwhile keeps only minimal code in VMM side. This will present the solution as well as the performance data and demonstrate how it can achieve simple and efficient interrupt handling for virtio-mmio device.

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Jing Liu
Intel
Software Engineer

Jing Liu is a software engineer working in Intel virtualization team. She focuses on hardware virtualization enabling work and innovation optimization projects for modern cloud in these years. She was once a speaker for colleges in previous company IBM.

Chao Peng
Intel
Senior Software Engineer

Chao Peng is a senior software engineer in Intel virtualization team. His responsibilities include enabling various hardware virtualization features in open source VMM/OS, as well as developing new usages models in virtualization and cloud environment. He was speaker in KVM forum/Xen summit/Linux Conference in past years.

Note: We apologize for lower video quality due to technical problems.

Container/Serverless