Hypervisor Multi-Architecture and RISC-V Support

Note

This is a preliminary draft of a planned and as yet unreleased effort to port the ACRN Hypervisor to non-Intel architectures.

From its first release in July 2018, the ACRN Hypervisor was designed for and targeted to Intel platforms and relied on Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT). From that base, we’re expanding support to enable the ACRN hypervisor to RISC-V64 architecture with a Hypervisor Extension.

RISC-V Support

Adding multi-architecture support begins by refining the current architecture abstraction layer and defining architecture-neutral APIs covering the management of cores, caches, memory, interrupts, timers, and hardware virtualization facilities. Then an implementation of those APIs for RISC-V will be introduced.

Based on its wide availability and flexibility, QEMU is the first RISC-V (virtual) platform this project targets. Real platforms may be selected later based on business and community interests.

Current State

This project is currently under development and is not yet ready for production. Once this support is implemented and has sufficient quality, this port will become a part of the upstream ACRN project and we’ll continue development there and encourage contributions by the ACRN community.

License

This project will be released under the BSD-3-Clause license, the same as the rest of project ACRN.