Being able to run AI models locally is one of the coolest tech things 2023 brought to the table. But given the extremely heterogeneous software stack for AI accelerators, doing that in an efficient way on your own laptop is not always as easy as it should be. For instance, if you’re running macOS on an Apple Silicon machine, you can easily build llama.cpp with its Metal backend and offload the inference work to the M-based GPU.| Sergio López's Blog
There’s this interesting idea of adding support for running Wasm/WASI payloads in libkrun, which is something we could easily achieve by simply embedding a Wasm runtime, statically built for Linux, into initrd. Now, the problem with this approach is that, despite having a payload (the Wasm runtime) with a well-known behavior, we would still be using a (built with a minimal config, but otherwise complete) Linux kernel, despite only needed a small amount of its functionality.| Sergio López's Blog
Sometimes, while working on macOS, you may find the need to test something quick on Linux, or use some utility that’s only available on this OS. But, of course, you don’t want to go through all the process of creating the VM from scratch. The good news is, you don’t need to! Using krunvm you can create and start a microVM from a regular container image (that is, an OCI image), in just two commands and a couple of seconds.| Sergio López's Blog
Are you feeling adventurous today? Good, so let’s give a try to some of the coolest upcoming technologies. podman is a tool for managing containers. If you’re familiar with docker, you’ll find it’s CLI quite similar. RHEL8 will include podman as part of the container-tools module. Kata Containers is an OCI Runtime which runs containerized processes inside a VM, using QEMU+KVM. This gives you the versatility of containers, with the isolation of a VM, among other nice features like stat...| Sergio López's Blog
As I wrote on my previous post, Enabling HYP mode on the Raspberry Pi 2, the newest machine from the Raspberry Pi Foundation features a Cortex-A7 with Virtualization Extensions, but it isn’t possible to make use of such feature out of the box. In that article I showed that it was possible to start the kernel in HYP mode. Now, I’ll cover the rest of steps needed for enabling KVM virtualization and running your first guest OS.| Sergio López's Blog
The newest iteration of the wonderful machine designed by Raspberry Pi Foundation, the Raspberry Pi 2, sports a Broadcom BCM2836 SoC, with four Cortex-A7 cores. The Cortex-A7, being the little brother Cortex-A15, features the ARM Virtualization Extensions, so both Xen and KVM based virtualization should work on it. At this point, you probably are wondering why would someone want to use virtualization on a RPi2. In addition to the usual “because you can!| Sergio López's Blog
This past Halloween, Alan Cox announced Fuzix OS, a project for building a UNIX-like operating system for 8 bit computers, based on UZI sources. This OS targets a number of physical machines, both old and homebrew computers, and some emulators too. The easiest and more approachable way for trying Fuzix OS is running it on cpmsim, which comes bundled inside the Z80pack package. If want to give it a try the easy way, just continue reading.| Sergio López's Blog
UPDATE: Mikolas has added support for the DE2-70 board. Check his repo here: https://github.com/mikolas/socz80-de0_nano Due to my intrinsic, chronic curiosity, for a long time I wanted to get a in touch with FPGA and related technologies (Verilog, VHDL, etc…), and experience the feeling of total control, having both hardware and software subdued to my control (well, not so much, due to the mysterious and semi-secret process of synthetization and fitting done by the tools involved in the pro...| Sergio López's Blog
Some time ago, ARM Holdings presented the new virtualization extensions for its processor architecture, which are now present on some models of the Cortex family, like the Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15. Though it’s a quite recent technology, both KVM and Xen hypervisors already support such extensions, allowing to run virtualized Guests in the same way you can already do on x86. It’s true that current SoCs (System-on-Chip) and development boards doesn’t provide a number of cores and RAM memo...| Sergio López's Blog
It’s been almost a year since I transitioned from the Virtualization to the Automotive team at Red Hat with the goal of ensuring RHIVOS ships with a powerful Virtualization stack. While there’s a large overlap between a Virtualization stack for Servers and the one for Automotive platforms, the latter is much more demanding on one particular aspect: GPU acceleration. For me, personally, that meant having to delve into the Linux graphics stack, both kernel (DRM, GEM, KMS…) and userspace (...| Sergio López's Blog