By Charles Babcock
If one day Linux provider Red Hat is a virtualization powerhouse, credit Avi Kivity, lead developer of the Kernel Virtual Machine, a hypervisor that runs inside the Linux kernel.
Kivity wasn’t a virtualization expert in 2005 when he joined Israeli startup Qumranet, after having worked as a programmer at IBM, Talmai, Exanet, and a company he co-founded, Avionitek. “I had to read a lot of manuals,” he recalls. His background in storage file systems, e-commerce marketing, and even flight avionics landed him in the team leader role for the C language-based development of KVM. When the team was ready to submit a hypervisor for inclusion in Linux, in October 2006, Kivity didn’t know anyone in the Linux kernel development process, but he had been a lurker on the kernel mailing list. “One of the things I picked up was how to submit code,” he says.
He had watched the prolonged, tangled discussion when the open source Xen hypervisor sought support from Linux kernel maintainers. He braced himself for feedback on KVM.
Among those commenting was Andrew Morton, Linus Torvalds’ top lieutenant. Convincing Morton that KVM was “a minimal system, quite simple technically,” was key, Kivity says. Linux kernel release 2.6.20 came out in February 2007 with KVM included—a short review for a 12,000-line code addition.
Unlike Xen, which operates outside the kernel, KVM was designed to use the kernel’s scheduler and memory manager rather than duplicate them, and that meant it could be tightly integrated into the kernel without disrupting its operation, Kivity says. Morton said in 2007 that KVM “looked like it was kernel-ready on day one. It was an exceptional patch in many ways.” Red Hat acquired Qumranet three months ago, and Kivity continues in the job of chief maintainer of KVM for the kernel. With Linux expected to play a large role in virtualized data centers, and KVM looking like the hypervisor of choice among open source developers, Kivity is well placed to play a significant role in the future of virtualization.
l Paul Maritz l George Socha l Manjit Singh l Jeff Teper l Sam Ruby l Barack Obama l Nir Zuk l Kirill Sheynkman l Marc Benioff l HD Moore l
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