New CPU Feature ERAPS Reduces Software Tax for Hardware Bugs

With the 5th gen AMD EPYC CPU, formerly codenamed “Turin”, AMD introduced a new feature in its processors: ERAPS - Enhanced RAP Security. For Linux, this feature allows software mitigations to be relaxed that were put in place after the SpectreRSB vulnerability was disclosed in hardware back in 2017. This...

Fedora Downstreams Made Easier

About six years ago, I quit my dream job at Red Hat to physically move to Germany. An unexpected casualty of that move was that my contributions to Fedora dried up. I kept running Fedora on all my systems, and also kept in touch with the Indian and APAC ambassadors;...

A Note on Ongoing Site Updates and Upkeep

Since about 4 years back, I’ve not really paid much attention to this blog - other than switching the backend from WordPress to Jekyll static pages served via Gitlab Pages. That means not only did I not write much content in those years, I ignored the site maintenance as well,...

The Turris Omnia Security-Focused Open Source Router

I recently bought the Turris Omnia router. It’s a security-focused router developed by the Czech NIC, a non-profit organization that controls the .cz TLD. It started as a research project for securing home networks. The organization has since launched a variety of hardware devices for secure home networking. At EUR...

SARS-COV-2: Why Do We Have the Pandemic Now?

Someone recently put the “what do we think about 2020” question differently, and very nicely: Many book readers like to skip to the end of books, and read the climax first, as they can’t stand the suspense. Had 2020 been a book, what would you have thought when skipping ahead,...

Ten Years of KVM: Article on LWN.net

As promised in the earlier post, I’ve written an article on some of the history and the journey of the KVM project: https://lwn.net/Articles/705160/ I was initially going to just do a writeup on this blog, but I asked the folks at LWN if they were interested.. and they were!  This...

Ten Years of KVM

We recently celebrated 25 years of Linux on the 25th anniversary of the famous email Linus sent to announce the start of the Linux project.  Going by the same yardstick, today marks the 10th anniversary of the KVM project – Avi Kivity first announced the project on the 19th Oct,...

FOSSASIA 2016 talk: Virtualization and Containers

I did a talk earlier today at the wonderful venue of the Science Centre Singapore at FOSSASIA 2016, titled ‘Virtualization and Containers.’ Over the last few years, several “cool new” and “next big thing” technologies have been introduced to the world, and these buzzwords leave people all dazed and confused....

Video From My FOSDEM 2016 Talk

The FOSDEM folks have processed and released the video on my “Live Migration of Virtual Machines From The Bottom Up” talk.  Available at this location. (Unable to embed video. Please follow links above to watch.)

FOSDEM 2016 Talk: Live Migration of Virtual Machines From The Bottom Up

I just did a talk titled ‘Live Migration of Virtual Machines From The Bottom Up’ at the FOSDEM conference in Brussels, Belgium.  The slides are available at this location. The talk introduced the KVM stack (Linux, KVM, QEMU, libvirt) and live migration; introduced ways the higher layers (especially oVirt and...