Teamproject: Developing a Minimal KVM-based Hypervisor for CStuBS

TBD

• Basic knowledge of C/C++ programming.
• Familiarity with Linux.

Write a mail to: fistanto@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de

• Virtualization from the Inside: Hands-on experience with hardware-assisted virtualization. You learn how a hypervisor works by building one yourself.

• KVM Interface: Get to know the Linux KVM API and use them to create your hypervisor.

• Collaborative Project Management: Development of high-level project management skills including independent planning, team coordination, and milestone adherence within a team setting.

• Preparatory Skills for Academic Steps: Foundation for significant academic projects like Bachelor's thesis through practical experience.

Virtualization is everywhere. It powers cloud computing, containers, and secure isolation, and it is one of the key technologies in modern system software. Yet for most developers, a hypervisor remains a black box. This team project is your chance to learn how hypervisor works!

So far, we have used QEMU + KVM to develop CStuBS. QEMU is a feature-rich hypervisor that can emulate a huge number of devices. CStuBS, however, is a teaching operating system and supports only a handful of them (CGA, keyboard, serial, ...). This makes QEMU overkill for our purposes. By developing our own hypervisor, we can minimize complexity and, at the same time, learn a lot more about how hypervisors work.

Your task is to build a minimal KVM-based hypervisor. The goal is for CStuBS to run on your hypervisor. Step by step, you will go from an empty virtual machine that does nothing to a hypervisor that boots a complete operating system, with a working screen, keyboard, and serial output.

Experience with CStuBS is helpful for this team project, but not required. What you will need to do is learn KVM and how to use its interface to build your own home-made hypervisor. Don’t worry if this sounds daunting: The journey from novice to becoming proficient takes practice. Getting stuck, debugging, and figuring things out together is part of the learning experience.

By the end of this project, you will:

• Understand how hypervisors work
• Know how to use the Linux KVM API to create VMs, configure vCPUs, and manage guest memory.
• Understand how a guest operating system interacts with its virtual hardware, and how a hypervisor handles VM exits for I/O and other events.
• Be able to emulate simple devices such as a text-mode display, a keyboard, and a serial port.
• Have worked on a larger systems programming project in a team, including planning, task distribution, and integration of each other’s work.
• Have a solid foundation for further steps in system software.

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