KVM Forum 2026

Aastha is a Software Engineer at Microsoft in Linux Systems Group. She works in the virtualization team. Her work spans the virtual machine monitors, and validation infrastructure, with contributions to projects including Cloud Hypervisor, QEMU.

Ackerley is a software engineer at Google Cloud. His work in the Confidential Computing team revolves around making guest_memfd useful and effective for CoCo VMs.

He is interested in operating systems, programming languages, and generally, beautiful code.

Adin Scannell is a software engineer at Meta. He has been in and out of the virtualization space for twenty years. He previously co-founded a startup building technology for VM cloning and guest introspection, which was acquired by Google. There, he led the creation and open-sourcing of gVisor and drove many efforts in the virtualization and container space.

Akihiko Odaki began contributing to QEMU to support Linux desktop environments virtualized on macOS running on Apple Silicon, with a focus on macOS GPU paravirtualization. He has since adopted Asahi Linux—a native Linux port for Apple Silicon—as his primary computing environment and has contributed improvements to QEMU/KVM compatibility on the platform.

Alongside his open-source work, Akihiko is a Ph.D. student at the University of Tokyo. His research focuses on processor microarchitecture, using QEMU to analyze AArch64 and RISC-V programs and optimize hardware designs for their execution speed.

He also maintains QEMU’s igb device emulation, which models an Intel NIC with SR-IOV capability.

Long time systems and embedded developer with a side of Dynamic Binary Translation.
Alex started learning to program in the 80s in an era of classic home computers that allowed you to get down and dirty at the system level. After graduating with a degree in Chemistry he's worked on a variety of projects including Fruit Machines, Line Cards, CCTV recorders and point-to-multipoint wireless microwave systems.
Since the turn of the century his primary focus has been working with FLOSS platforms, especially Linux. An alumni of Transitive he has a broad experience of cross-platform virtualization as well as a strong background in telecommunications and networking. He leads the QEMU team ensuring the latest features are available so developers can develop and test their code before silicon becomes widely available. He also contributes to the work on VirtIO allowing devices of all types to be efficiently shared with guests.
A keen Emacs user he will happily answer questions and proselytise for the One True Editor (tm).

Alex Williamson is a longtime Linux kernel and QEMU developer working for NVIDIA from Fort Collins, Colorado. Alex is the maintainer of the Linux VFIO subsystem, which enables IOMMU-protected access to physical devices for userspace drivers and virtual machines. Alex also co-maintains VFIO support in QEMU and contributes to various Linux subsystems, including PCI and IOMMU.

Alexander works at AWS, where he is responsible for the Nitro Hypervisor, focusing on Confidential Compute technologies, cross-platform hypervisor features and security. Previously, he worked on QEMU, KVM, openSUSE / SLES on ARM and U-Boot. Whenever something really useful comes to his mind, he implements it. Among others he did Mac OS X virtualization using KVM, nested SVM, KVM on PowerPC, a lot of work in QEMU for openSUSE on ARM and the UEFI compatibility layer in U-Boot.

Alok Kumar is a Senior System Software Engineer at NVIDIA, where he focuses on GPU virtualization for NVIDIA GPU platforms.

Anatol Belski is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft working on Linux virtualization and cloud infrastructure. He contributes to various OSS projects, including Cloud Hypervisor. He is interested in virtio, virtual block devices, disk image formats, and virtualization testing. He is the author of Virtio Villain, a testing framework for virtio device implementations across several VMMs.

I am a software engineer who works for Red Hat in the virtualization engineering group. My primary focus areas are Confidential computing, QEMU, KVM, libvirt and open source cloud virtualization tools like cloud-init, Microsoft WALA agent, hyperv-daemons etc. My Red Hat personal page is located at: https://people.redhat.com/~anisinha/

Anirudh Rayabharam is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft working on Linux virtualization and the Hyper-V ecosystem. His work spans the Linux kernel, virtual machine monitors, and validation infrastructure, with contributions to projects including Cloud Hypervisor, QEMU, and the upstream Linux kernel.

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.

Aseef is a Software Engineer at Red Hat, where he works on KubeVirt. He is an active upstream contributor to the project. Aseef holds a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Science from Boston University.

KVM/s390 co-maintainer.

David is a Software Engineer at Google that has been working on KVM and virtualization for over 10 years, with a recent focus on Device Virtualization and Live Update technologies. David is currently the maintainer for VFIO selftests in the Linux Kernel.

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.

Bytedance Virtualization Engineer.

Bytedance Virtualization Engineer.

Kernel Developer.

James Bottomley is a Distinguished Engineer at IBM Research where he
works on Cloud and Container technology. He is also Linux Kernel
maintainer of the SCSI subsystem. He has been a Director on the Board
of the Linux Foundation and Chair of its Technical Advisory Board. He
went to university at Cambridge for both his undergraduate and
doctoral degrees after which he joined AT&T Bell labs to work on
Distributed Lock Manager technology for clustering. In 2000 he helped
found SteelEye Technology, a High availability company for Linux and
Windows, becoming Vice President and CTO. He joined Novell in 2008 as
a Distinguished Engineer at Novell's SUSE Labs, Parallels (later Odin)
in 2011 as CTO of Server Virtualization and IBM Research in 2016. He has
been active around legal issues in Open Source since 2006.

I work on virtualization at Google, mostly focusing on live migration and memory management.

James Nutaro is a Distinguished R&D Scientist and Group Lead in the Computational Systems Engineering & Cybernetics group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. His research focuses on modeling and simulation methods, with a specific emphasis on systems integration, systems of systems performance assessment, and modeling from data.

KVM engineer @ Google

Jörg is Principal Member of Technical Staff at AMD and the creator and maintainer of the COCONUT-SVSM project. Prior to this, he lead the Confidential Computing efforts at SUSE, working on enabling SEV and related technologies. In this role he implemented major parts of the AMD SEV-ES guest support in the Linux kernel and brought it upstream into kernel 5.10. He is also active in the Linux kernel community as the maintainer for the IOMMU subsystem and a contributor to other areas like KVM or the X86 architecture.

Member of Technical Staff 2 @ Nutanix

Kishen Maloor is a Linux kernel engineer at Intel, currently working on enabling live migration for TDX guests in KVM and QEMU. He previously added netlink APIs to MPTCP for userspace-driven path management. Before moving to the kernel, he worked on edge and IoT software and standards, representing Intel in industry consortia, and earlier on middleware and frameworks for client devices.

Luigi is a Software Engineer in Red Hat virtualization team. His main focus are confidential computing and firmware.

Manish Honap is a Senior System Software Engineer at NVIDIA, where he focuses on GPU virtualization and enabling passthrough GPU support for NVIDIA GPU platforms.

Marc Zyngier has been toying with the Linux kernel since 1993, and has been involved over time with the RAID subsystem (MD), the interrupt subsystem, 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.

Melody works for AMD in the Linux kernel team on secure virtualization. Currently she is working on implementing alternate injection for SEV-SNP virtual machines. In the past, Melody had worked on the security of trusted execution environment, including AMD SEV series and Intel SGX. She was specializing in computer system security and privacy, including cloud computing, blockchain, and data privacy.

Michael Roth is a member of the Datacenter Linux Kernel and Virtualization Development team at AMD who is currently working on linux guest/hypervisor support for SEV-SNP. He has been working on KVM virtualization for x86 and PowerPC since 2010, and has done a number of KVM Forum talks on various topic throughout that time.

Software engineer in Google

Virtualization engineer.

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.

Red Hat virtualization engineer, working on QEMU/KVM and Linux.

Software engineer at Qualcomm working on QEMU for hexagon and heterogeneous emulation.

Ex-Google, Colossus TL - multi-purpose storage foundations, got to work on most of its different parts.
Ebpf-based live cloud debugger for compiled languages, first at startup, then at Datadog.
Now storage lead at Blacksmith.
Doing data-driven optimizations whenever I find opportunity.

Rick is a kernel engineer working on TDX, as well as various x86 security and memory technologies.

Member of technical staff at Nutanix

I have been a UNIX and Linux enthusiast for more than three decades now and have been contributing to open source especially in the area of identity, security and distributed systems.

For the past few years, my team at Microsoft has been focused on improving the security of Linux Based systems in Azure, especially in the area of code integrity and confidential computing.

I am currently serving as a Principal Software Architect in the Azure Linux team at Microsoft.

Stefan works on QEMU and Linux VIRTIO drivers in Red Hat's Virtualization team. He focuses on storage and has worked on virtiofs, virtio-vsock, and tracing in the past. A QEMU contributor since 2010, he organizes open source internships for QEMU and is part of QEMU's Technical Leadership Committee.

Software Engineer in the Kernel Security team at Google

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 and virtio devices support.

Steffen is a kernel/KVM developer with a strong focus on the s390 architecture and Hardware-Accelerated Cross-Architecture Virtual Machines.

I'm software engineer at Nutanix, I focus on storage performance and disk I/O virtualization.

Tom Lendacky is a member of the Linux OS group at Advanced Micro Devices where he is responsible for enabling and enhancing support for AMD processor features in the Linux kernel. He is currently working on extending the SEV support in the Linux kernel to further enhance the features and capabilities of SEV-SNP (Secure Encrypted Virtualization - Secure Nested Paging). He has spoken at various Linux events, including KVM Forum a few times.

Vinayak Kale is a Senior Systems Software Engineer at NVIDIA where he focuses on NVIDIA vGPU driver development on KVM-based hypervisors. Vinayak specializes in live-migration optimizations for NVIDIA vGPU driver stack.

Xiangfeng is a software engineer at ByteDance, working on the KVM/QEMU virtualization stack that powers the company's large-scale cloud infrastructure.

Yan Vugenfirer is a senior principal SW engineer at Red Hat and a maintainer of the virt-win project. Yan has been enabling Windows guests' operation in QEMU/KVM environment for more than 15 years.

I am currently working at bytedance as a OS virtualization enginer. Daily works focus on KVM and QEMU and dedicated to enable cloud computing for large scale datacenters.

I am responsible for Windows-related initiatives at Alibaba Cloud, including planning, development, and support for Windows workloads. In this role, I have worked extensively on diagnosing difficult Windows VM failures in production, with a focus on backend-assisted observability for opaque issues such as boot failures, hangs, and BSODs.

Virtualization Engineer at ByteDance

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.

I am now working for ByteDance., currently focusing on QEMU/KVM/Virtualization related projects.

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