[nova][dev] Revisiting qemu emulation where guest arch != host arch

Apsey, Christopher CAPSEY at augusta.edu
Wed Jul 15 14:17:09 UTC 2020


All,

A few years ago I asked a question[1] about why nova, when given a hw_architecture property from glance for an image, would not end up using the correct qemu-system-xx binary when starting the guest process on a compute node if that compute nodes architecture did not match the proposed guest architecture.  As an example, if we had all x86 hosts, but wanted to run an emulated ppc guest, we should be able to do that given that at least one compute node had qemu-system-ppc already installed and libvirt was successfully reporting that as a supported architecture to nova.  It seemed like a heavy lift at the time, so it was put on the back burner.

I am now in a position to fund a contract developer to make this happen, so the question is: would this be a useful blueprint that would potentially be accepted?  Most of the time when people want to run an emulated guest they would just nest it inside of an already running guest of the native architecture, but that severely limits observability and the task of managing any more than a handful of instances in this manner quickly becomes a tangled nightmare of networking, etc.  I see real benefit in allowing this scenario to run natively so all of the tooling that exists for fleet management 'just works'.  This would also be a significant differentiator for OpenStack as a whole.

Thoughts?

[1]
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-operators/2018-August/015653.html

Chris Apsey
Director | Georgia Cyber Range
GEORGIA CYBER CENTER

100 Grace Hopper Lane | Augusta, Georgia | 30901
https://www.gacybercenter.org

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