KVM Forum 2025

Akihiko Odaki, a Ph.D. student at the University of Tokyo, is passionate about designing faster processors. His research focuses on processor microarchitecture, specifically using QEMU to analyze RISC-V programs and optimize processor designs for their execution speed.

He was also a software engineer at Daynix Computing, Ltd, and his primary focus at the company was QEMU's networking subsystem. Notably, he contributed igb, a critical component that emulates an Intel network interface card with advanced virtualization capabilities. Akihiko's interests on QEMU extend beyond RISC-V emulation and networking and include macOS support, Asahi Linux (a port of Linux for Apple Silicon) support, and para-virtualized graphics.

Staff Software Engineer at Qualcomm - member of Qbox team (https://github.com/quic/qbox)

Ankit is an open-source developer working for NVIDIA on vGPU and Passthrough virtualization. He is currently working actively on providing virtualization support on NVIDIA Grace based systems.

Compiler engineer at rev.ng. Interested in all things maths!:)

Working in the Google Open Source Security Team (GOSST), primarily on topics related to boot security and crypto

A developer working on Linux-based virtualization (QEMU / KVM).

Colton Lewis is a software engineer on the Google KVM Team. He draws on 9 years of professional experience and graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering from the Missouri University of Science and Technology in 2016. He is passionate about operating systems, programming languages, books, piano, tabletop games, and weightlifting.

Cornelia has been contributing to QEMU and KVM for more than ten years, recently looking at the Arm side of things. She is currently working for Red Hat.

Daniel is a Senior Principal Software Engineer, working in a variety of roles at Red Hat over the last 23 years. Since 2006, he has been specialized in the development of technologies related to virtualization management, as lead developer of Libvirt, GTK-VNC, Libvirt Perl, Libvirt GObject and Libvirt Sandbox, and contributor to the Xen, KVM, oVirt and OpenStack projects. Daniel is a passionate believer in the value of open source software and the benefits it brings to the world. Daniel is also creator and maintainer of the Bichon GitLab terminal code review application, and the Entangle remote camera control & capture software.

Software Engineer in the Virtualization and Networking (virtio-net) team at Red Hat

Software engineer at Google

Gerd Hoffmann is working in the Red Hat virtualization team. Main
focus in recent years is firmware for virtual machines, where he is
working on both guest side projects (seabios, edk2, svsm) and host
side support in qemu. Before getting more deeply involved in firmware
support Gerd has maintained multiple subsystems (graphics, usb, audio)
in qemu.

Hypervisor Engineer @ Nutanix

I’ve been working for Red Hat in the virtualization storage area for a couple of years, first on the QEMU block layer, later primarily on virtio-fs.

I am a Software Engineer on the AHV team at Nutanix. I mainly work in the virtualization domain, with a focus on NUMA systems, exposing the correct NUMA topology and improving vNUMA performance in virtualized environments. I am passionate about bridging the gap between hardware capabilities and software optimization to deliver measurable performance improvements for enterprise virtualization workloads.

Software engineer at Nutanix, and vfio-user maintainer.

Jon Kohler is a Principal Engineer on the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) Host R&D team at Nutanix. He's been with Nutanix since 2014, focusing on core platform performance and scalability in both the AOS Core Data Path and AHV Linux Kernel. His performance work includes profiling, visualization, and developing code from concept to production.

Kohei Tokunaga is a software engineer at NTT Corporation. In the QEMU community, he has been working on WebAssembly port and is maintaining QEMU's WebAssembly host support.

Marc Zyngier has been toying with the Linux kernel since 1993, and has been involved over time with the RAID subsystem (MD) and all sorts of obsolete computer architectures.
He also messed with consumer electronics, cloud infrastructure, mobile phones and CPU design while
keeping track of the ARM architecture and co-maintaining KVM/arm64.

Michael S. Tsirkin has been around KVM seemingly forever - he probably touched in one way of another all parts of Linux and QEMU by now. Currently, Michael is the chair of the Virtio TC and Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat.

Mickaël Salaün is a kernel developer and open source enthusiast. He is mainly interested in Linux-based operating systems, especially from a security point of view. He has built security sandboxes before hacking into the kernel on a new LSM called Landlock, of which he is now the maintainer. He previously worked for the French national cybersecurity agency (ANSSI) on systems hardening. He is currently employed by Microsoft to work on Linux-related security projects.

I work in Red Hat's Virtualization Team, focusing on confidential virtualization, firmware, and booting.

Paolo Bonzini works on virtualization for Red Hat, where he is a Distinguished Engineer. He is currently the maintainer of the KVM hypervisor and a contributor and submaintainer for QEMU.

Pierrick works on QEMU at Linaro, focusing on Arm architecture and TCG plugins.

Free and open source software engineer.

Quentin Perret is a Software Engineer at Google in the Android Systems team. His work focuses on the development of the pKVM hypervisor and its deployment in the Android ecosystem. Quentin is also an upstream Linux contributor who has worked on both KVM/arm and the scheduler.

Software engineer, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Member of Kata Containers Architecture Committee
Cloud-Hypervisor Committer

Sergey is a Senior Engineer on the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) Host R&D team at Nutanix.

HyperVisor Engineer@Nutanix

I work for the AHV team at Nutanix where most of my work to date is around improving live migration algorithms. Other than live migration, my interests lie in systems and virtualization in general.

I am a software engineer working for the hypervisor team in Nutanix with interests in areas of virtualization, performance and live migration. Apart from this I also like to explore new platform technologies.

Stefano is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. He is the maintainer of Linux's vsock subsystem (AF_VSOCK) and co-maintainer of rust-vmm and COCONUT SVSM. Current projects cover Confidential VMs, virtio devices, storage for VMs.

I hold a Master's degree in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. My research focused on virtualization technologies, particularly QEMU/KVM systems.

I'm software engineer at Nutanix, mainly focusing on disk I/O virtualization.

Thomas Huth is working for Red Hat in the virtualization team, taking care of keeping the virtualization stack on the IBM Z (s390x) platform in a good shape. Additionally he's also involved in the upstream QEMU project when time permits.

Tobin Feldman-Fitzthum is a Software Engineer at the T.J. Watson IBM Research Center. His focus is secure virtualization and confidential computing. After working on live migration, encrypted disk images, and remote attestation for confidential VMs, Tobin helped found the Confidential Containers project and establish it as a CNCF sandbox project.

Vaishali Thakkar works on Confidential Computing at SUSE. She has previously worked in various subsystems of the kernel as part of her job and was involved with Outreachy as a Linux kernel coordinator for few years. She has given talks at various conferences like Linux Plumbers Conference, FOSDEM, LinuxCon, Xen Summit etc.

Beer, fishing, hacking.

Zhao is a virtualization engineer from Intel.

Zhi is an open-source developer working on vGPU, confidential computing, and virtualization. He is currently working on NVIDIA vGPU. For confidential computing, he is interested in Intel TDX/AMD SEV-SNP and worked on TDX Connect enabling at Intel.

A postgraduate student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, currently focusing on contributing to the software ecosystem of the RISC-V platform.