Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Notes from KVM Forum 2018

KVM Forum 2018 took place October 24 - 26 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Better late than never, here are some of my notes and impressions. As always, there was a lot going on, and I could not attend everything that I would have found interesting. Fortunately, video recordings are available (see the page linked above, respectively the YouTube channel); here, I'd like to thank the folks organizing the logistics, recording the talks, and uploading nicely edited versions!

This year, KVM Forum was again co-located with OSS Europe, and on the first day (which also featured the annual QEMU summit), talks were on a shared track. This meant an opportunity for people attending OSS to hear some KVM and virtualization related talks; unfortunately, it also meant that the room where the KVM Forum talks were held was very crowded. Nevertheless, it is always nice if a talk is interesting enough to attract a good number of people; I'm happy that my maintainership talk also attracted a nice audience. Other talks from the first day I enjoyed were Alex' talk about L1TF and Marc's talk about running huge libvirt installations.

The second and third day featured some more comfortable rooms; organization-wise, I liked that talks about similar topics were grouped back-to-back.

On these days, we had the keynotes for KVM, QEMU, and libvirt; as well as the contributor Q&A panel - some good questions from the audience there. Also check out Christian's talk about the various architectures supported by KVM and how much commonality is there (or not).

Most of the time, days two and three were dual-track. Some of the topics covered were vfio and migration with vfio; nested virtualization; not-so-common architectures (including s390!); testing and continuous integration. I find it hard to point out specific sessions and recommend browsing through the posted videos instead.

Some topics were delved into more deeply in BOF sessions; myself, I attended the vfio migration BOF which gave me a couple of things to think about. Many BOF sessions subsequently posted summaries on the relevant mailing lists.

One of the most important features of any conference is, of course, the hallway track: Meeting new people, seeing old acquaintances again, and impromptu discussions about a lot of different topics. I find that this is one of the most valuable experiences, both for putting a face to a name and for discussing things you did not event think about beforehand.

So, for an even shorter summary of my short notes: KVM Forum 2018 was great, go watch some videos, and consider attending future KVM Forums :)