Guo Dong
Guo Dong has been actively engaged in firmware development since 2007, beginning with contributions to EDK and EDK2. After several years of experience with coreboot, he co-founded the Slim Bootloader (SBL) project alongside his team. Guo Dong currently focuses on advancing SBL and developing UEFI payload solutions, maintaining a strong commitment to open-source firmware innovation and platform enablement.
Shipping the Hypervisor in Firmware: A Static-Partitioning Payload for Slim Bootloader
This talk introduces HypervisorPayload — a Slim Bootloader payload that bundles and launches an open-source hypervisor (currently ACRN) as a single signed firmware artifact. Internally it has two parts: HvLoader, a small launcher that runs first, and the hypervisor binary it carries. The bootloader verifies HypervisorPayload once and forwards the platform VM configuration to it, eliminating the need for a separate hypervisor verification step.
At runtime, HvLoader retrieves the SBL VM configuration (CPU, memory, MMIO, IRQ, PCI passthrough) and passes it through to the hypervisor, loads guest kernels from boot media, builds a multiboot2 module table, and performs a one-shot register handoff to the hypervisor before leaving the control path. Statically pre-launched guests then boot natively on their dedicated vCPUs and passthrough devices — with no Service VM, no post-launched VMs, and no runtime control channel — allowing heterogeneous OS combinations (for example, Zephyr alongside Linux, Trusty alongside Android, or any mix of RTOS, general-purpose, and trusted guests) to run side by side on a single SoC with strong isolation and deterministic boot.
From the OS side, HypervisorPayload simply looks like the hypervisor that BIOS provides.