AlacrityVM

(def) Alacrity - (n) liveliness, promptness

About

AlacrityVM is a performance focused hypervisor based on the Linux KVM project. Virtualized environments often impose significant performance penalties against a given workload when compared to native "bare-metal" equivalents. This project is motivated by the belief that it doesn't necessarily have to be this way, nor do we need exotic hardware to achieve it. AlacrityVM demonstrates that most of the existing performance bottlenecks in today's system are simply the result of suboptimal software stacks. By systematically identifying and fixing the weak links in the guest/hypervisor equation, near native performance from a virtualized environment is realistically achievable.

We also aim to add new features, such as the ability to express real-time constraints, network qos, virtual filesystems, etc.

Status

AlacrityVM is an open-source project still in the early stages of development. Since it is based on KVM, it of course supports all the basic features as found in the upstream KVM project. In addition, we have a working design which includes the basic hypervisor, linux-guest support, and accelerated networking. We will be expanding this to include other areas of importance, such as accelerated disk-io, IPC, real-time extensions, and accelerated MS Windows guest support.

It is a goal of AlacrityVM to work towards upstream acceptance of the project on a timeline that suits the community. In the meantime, this wiki will serve as the central coordination point for development and discussion of the technology.

Help Wanted

We are actively looking for both Users and Developers to help us refine and enhance the technology. If you are interested, please take a look at some of the links on the right.