Open Source Summit connects the open source ecosystem under one roof. It covers cornerstone open source technologies; helps ecosystem leaders to navigate open source transformation; and delves into the newest technologies and latest trends touching open source. It is an extraordinary opportunity for cross-pollination between the developers, sysadmins, DevOps professionals, IT architects, and business & community leaders driving the future of technology.
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The ability to update software with critical bug fixes and security mitigations while minimizing downtime is valued highly by customers and providers. In this talk, Steve presents a new method for updating a running instance of QEMU to a new version while minimizing the impact on the VM guest. The guest pauses briefly, for less than 200 msec in the prototype, without loss of internal state or external connections. The old QEMU process exec's the new QEMU binary, and preserves anonymous guest RAM at the same virtual address via a proposed Linux madvise variant. Descriptors for external connections are preserved, and VFIO pass through devices are supported by preserving the VFIO device descriptors and attaching them to a new KVM instance after exec. The update method requires code changes to QEMU, but no changes are required in system libraries or the KVM kernel module.