Virtualization for the Masses: Exposing KVM on Android
summary
Project exposes KVM on Android by running a tiny hypervisor at EL2 as a self-contained Protected KVM payload embedded in the GKI kernel; patches land in Linux 5.9/5.10. It uses a standalone stage‑2 page‑table walker and an EL2 buddy allocator bootstrapped via a temporary PGD, and the userspace platform is CrosVM. Vendor blobs run in guests booted by a template Rust bootloader. Result: isolation mostly works, virtio runs with bounce buffering, zero‑copy/shared‑memory and full IO passthrough remain unsolved.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:00Generic Kernel Image
- 6:10Virtualization on Android
- 9:22ARM exception model
- 14:55Hardware virtualization
- 15:55Exception level diagrams
- 24:13El2 Security Improvements
- 27:04Problems with KVM
- 29:35Page Table Walker
- 31:20bootstrap
- 33:19page table
- 35:42template bootloader
- 37:25CrossVM
- 39:34Vertio
- 40:26Bounce buffering
- 43:07Next steps
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