GiantVM: A Many-to-one Virtualization System Built Atop the QEMU/KVM Hypervisor
Xiong Tianlei, Songtao Xue, Muliang Shou
We propose GiantVM, a many-to-one virtualization framework built atop QEMU/KVM. GiantVM consolidates multiple physical servers into a unified virtual machine. We extend QEMU/KVM to enable inter-machine forwarding of I/O and interrupts, allowing multiple physical machines to communicate over the network and aggregate CPU and I/O resources. In addition, we implement a distributed shared memory protocol by leveraging the EPT to support memory synchronization across machines.
Our implementation is based on QEMU 9.0 and the Linux 6.6 LTS kernel, and is capable of successfully running operating systems such as Ubuntu. We are currently exploring further enhancements leveraging the emerging Compute Express Link (CXL) interconnect.