This is an architectural overview of Kata Containers, based on the 1.2.0 release.
The two primary deliverables of the Kata Containers project are a container runtime and a CRI friendly library API.
The Kata Containers runtime (kata-runtime)
is compatible with the OCI runtime specification
and therefore works seamlessly with the
Docker* Engine pluggable runtime
architecture. It also supports the Kubernetes* Container Runtime Interface (CRI)
through the CRI-O* and
Containerd CRI Plugin* implementation. In other words, you can transparently
select between the default Docker and CRI shim runtime (runc)
and kata-runtime
.
kata-runtime
creates a QEMU*/KVM virtual machine for each container or pod,
the Docker engine or Kubernetes' kubelet
creates respectively.
The container process is then spawned by agent, an agent process running as a daemon inside the virtual machine. kata-agent runs a gRPC server in the guest using a virtio serial interface which QEMU exposes as a serial device on the host. kata-runtime uses a gRPC protocol to communicate with the agent. This protocol allows the runtime to send container management commands to the agent. The protocol is also used to pass I/O streams (stdout, stderr, stdin) between the guest and the Docker Engine.
For any given container, both the init process and all potentially executed
commands within that container, together with their related I/O streams, need
to go through the virtio serial interface exported by QEMU. A Kata Containers
proxy (kata-proxy
) instance is
launched for each virtual machine to handle multiplexing and demultiplexing
those commands and streams.
On the host, each container process's removal is handled by a reaper in the higher
layers of the container stack. In the case of Docker it is handled by containerd-shim
.
In the case of CRI-O it is handled by conmon
. For clarity, for the remainder
of this document the term "container process reaper" will be used to refer to
either reaper. As Kata Containers processes run inside their own virtual machines,
the container process reaper cannot monitor, control
or reap them. kata-runtime
fixes that issue by creating an additional shim process
(kata-shim
) between the container process
reaper and kata-proxy
. A kata-shim
instance will both forward signals and stdin
streams to the container process on the guest and pass the container stdout
and stderr
streams back up the stack to the CRI shim or Docker via the container process
reaper. kata-runtime
creates a kata-shim
daemon for each container and for each
OCI command received to run within an already running container (example, docker exec
).
The container workload, that is, the actual OCI bundle rootfs, is exported from the
host to the virtual machine. In the case where a block-based graph driver is
configured, virtio-scsi will be used. In all other cases a 9pfs virtio mount point
will be used. kata-agent
uses this mount point as the root filesystem for the
container processes.
Kata Containers is designed to support multiple hypervisors. For the 1.0 release, Kata Containers uses just QEMU/KVM to create virtual machines where containers will run:
Depending on the host architecture, Kata Containers supports various machine types,
for example pc
and q35
on x86 systems, virt
on ARM systems and pseries
on IBM Power systems. Kata Containers'
default machine type is pc
. The default machine type and its Machine accelerators
can
be changed by editing the runtime configuration
file.
The following QEMU features are used in Kata Containers to manage resource constraints, improve boot time and reduce memory footprint:
- Machine accelerators.
- Hot plug devices.
Each feature is documented below.
Machine accelerators are architecture specific and can be used to improve the performance and enable specific features of the machine types. The following machine accelerators are used in Kata Containers:
- nvdimm: This machine accelerator is x86 specific and only supported by
pc
andq35
machine types.nvdimm
is used to provide the root filesystem as a persistent memory device to the Virtual Machine.
Although Kata Containers can run with any recent QEMU release, Kata Containers
boot time, memory footprint and 9p IO are significantly optimized by using a specific
QEMU version called qemu-lite
and
custom machine accelerators that are not available in the upstream version of QEMU.
These custom machine accelerators are described below.
- nofw: this machine accelerator is x86 specific and only supported by
pc
andq35
machine types.nofw
is used to boot an ELF format kernel by skipping the BIOS/firmware in the guest. This custom machine accelerator improves boot time significantly. - static-prt: this machine accelerator is x86 specific and only supported by
pc
andq35
machine types.static-prt
is used to reduce the interpretation burden for guest ACPI component.
The Kata Containers VM starts with a minimum amount of resources, allowing for faster boot time and a reduction in memory footprint. As the container launch progresses, devices are hotplugged to the VM. For example, when a CPU constraint is specified which includes additional CPUs, they can be hot added. Kata Containers has support for hot-adding the following devices:
- Virtio block
- Virtio SCSI
- VFIO
- CPU
The hypervisor will launch a virtual machine which includes a minimal guest kernel and a guest image.
The guest kernel is passed to the hypervisor and used to boot the virtual machine. The default kernel provided in Kata Containers is highly optimized for kernel boot time and minimal memory footprint, providing only those services required by a container workload. This is based on a very current upstream Linux kernel.
Kata Containers supports both an initrd
and rootfs
based minimal guest image.
The default packaged root filesystem image, sometimes referred to as the "mini O/S", is a highly optimized container bootstrap system based on Clear Linux. It provides an extremely minimal environment and has a highly optimized boot path.
The only services running in the context of the mini O/S are the init daemon
(systemd
) and the Agent. The real workload the user wishes to run
is created using libcontainer, creating a container in the same manner that is done
by runc
.
For example, when docker run -ti ubuntu date
is run:
- The hypervisor will boot the mini-OS image using the guest kernel.
systemd
, running inside the mini-OS context, will launch thekata-agent
in the same context.- The agent will create a new confined context to run the specified command in
(
date
in this example). - The agent will then execute the command (
date
in this example) inside this new context, first setting the root filesystem to the expected Ubuntu* root filesystem.
placeholder
kata-agent
is a process running in the
guest as a supervisor for managing containers and processes running within
those containers.
The kata-agent
execution unit is the sandbox. A kata-agent
sandbox is a container sandbox defined by a set of namespaces (NS, UTS, IPC and PID). kata-runtime
can
run several containers per VM to support container engines that require multiple
containers running inside a pod. In the case of docker, kata-runtime
creates a
single container per pod.
kata-agent
communicates with the other Kata components over gRPC.
It also runs a yamux
server on the same gRPC URL.
The kata-agent
makes use of libcontainer
to manage the lifecycle of the container. This way the kata-agent
reuses most
of the code used by runc
.
placeholder
kata-runtime
is an OCI compatible container runtime and is responsible for handling
all commands specified by
the OCI runtime specification
and launching kata-shim
instances.
kata-runtime
heavily utilizes the
virtcontainers project, which
provides a generic, runtime-specification agnostic, hardware-virtualized containers
library.
The runtime uses a TOML format configuration file called configuration.toml
. By
default this file is installed in the /usr/share/defaults/kata-containers
directory and contains various settings such as the paths to the hypervisor,
the guest kernel and the mini-OS image.
Most users will not need to modify the configuration file.
The file is well commented and provides a few "knobs" that can be used to modify the behavior of the runtime.
The configuration file is also used to enable runtime debug output.
Here we describe how kata-runtime
handles the most important OCI commands.
When handling the OCI create
command, kata-runtime
goes through the following steps:
- Create the network namespace where we will spawn VM and shims processes.
- Call into the pre-start hooks. One of them should be responsible for creating
the
veth
network pair between the host network namespace and the network namespace freshly created. - Scan the network from the new network namespace, and create a MACVTAP connection
between the
veth
interface and atap
interface into the VM. - Start the VM inside the network namespace by providing the
tap
interface previously created. - Wait for the VM to be ready.
- Start
kata-proxy
, which will connect to the created VM. Thekata-proxy
process will take care of proxying all communications with the VM. Kata has a single proxy per VM. - Communicate with
kata-agent
(through the proxy) to configure the sandbox inside the VM. - Communicate with
kata-agent
to create the container, relying on the OCI configuration fileconfig.json
initially provided tokata-runtime
. This spawns the container process inside the VM, leveraging thelibcontainer
package. - Start
kata-shim
, which will connect to the gRPC server socket provided by thekata-proxy
.kata-shim
will spawn a few Go routines to parallelize blocking callsReadStdout()
,ReadStderr()
andWaitProcess()
. BothReadStdout()
andReadStderr()
are run through infinite loops sincekata-shim
wants the output of those until the container process terminates.WaitProcess()
is a unique call which returns the exit code of the container process when it terminates inside the VM. Note thatkata-shim
is started inside the network namespace, to allow upper layers to determine which network namespace has been created and by checking thekata-shim
process. It also creates a new PID namespace by entering into it. This ensures that allkata-shim
processes belonging to the same container will get killed when thekata-shim
representing the container process terminates.
At this point the container process is running inside of the VM, and it is represented
on the host system by the kata-shim
process.
With traditional containers, start
launches a container process in its own set of namespaces. With Kata Containers, the main task of kata-runtime
is to ask kata-agent
to start the container workload inside the virtual machine. kata-runtime
will run through the following steps:
- Communicate with
kata-agent
(through the proxy) to start the container workload inside the VM. If, for example, the command to execute inside of the container istop
, thekata-shim
'sReadStdOut()
will start returning text output for top, andWaitProcess()
will continue to block as long as thetop
process runs. - Call into the post-start hooks. Usually, this is a no-op since nothing is provided (this needs clarification)
OCI exec
allows you to run an additional command within an already running
container. In Kata Containers, this is handled as follows:
- A request is sent to the
kata agent
(through the proxy) to start a new process inside an existing container running within the VM. - A new
kata-shim
is created within the same network and PID namespaces as the originalkata-shim
representing the container process. This newkata-shim
is used for the new exec process.
Now the exec
'ed process is running within the VM, sharing uts
, pid
, mnt
and ipc
namespaces with the container process.
When sending the OCI kill
command, the container runtime should send a
UNIX signal to the container process.
A kill
sending a termination signal such as SIGKILL
or SIGTERM
is expected
to terminate the container process. In the context of a traditional container,
this means stopping the container. For kata-runtime
, this translates to stopping
the container and the VM associated with it.
- Send a request to kill the container process to the
kata-agent
(through the proxy). - Wait for
kata-shim
process to exit. - Force kill the container process if
kata-shim
process didn't return after a timeout. This is done by communicating withkata-agent
(connecting the proxy), sendingSIGKILL
signal to the container process inside the VM. - Wait for
kata-shim
process to exit, and return an error if we reach the timeout again. - Communicate with
kata-agent
(through the proxy) to remove the container configuration from the VM. - Communicate with
kata-agent
(through the proxy) to destroy the sandbox configuration from the VM. - Stop the VM.
- Remove all network configurations inside the network namespace and delete the namespace.
- Execute post-stop hooks.
If kill
was invoked with a non-termination signal, this simply signals the container process. Otherwise, everything has been torn down, and the VM has been removed.
delete
removes all internal resources related to a container. A running container
cannot be deleted unless the OCI runtime is explicitly being asked to, by using
--force
flag.
If the sandbox is not stopped, but the particular container process returned on
its own already, the kata-runtime
will first go through most of the steps a kill
would go through for a termination signal. After this process, or if the sandboxID was already stopped to begin with, then kata-runtime
will:
- Remove container resources. Every file kept under
/var/{lib,run}/virtcontainers/sandboxes/<sandboxID>/<containerID>
. - Remove sandbox resources. Every file kept under
/var/{lib,run}/virtcontainers/sandboxes/<sandboxID>
.
At this point, everything related to the container should have been removed from the host system, and no related process should be running.
state
returns the status of the container. For kata-runtime
, this means being
able to detect if the container is still running by looking at the state of kata-shim
process representing this container process.
- Ask the container status by checking information stored on disk. (clarification needed)
- Check
kata-shim
process representing the container. - In case the container status on disk was supposed to be
ready
orrunning
, and thekata-shim
process no longer exists, this involves the detection of a stopped container. This means that before returning the container status, the container has to be properly stopped. Here are the steps involved in this detection:- Wait for
kata-shim
process to exit. - Force kill the container process if
kata-shim
process didn't return after a timeout. This is done by communicating withkata-agent
(connecting the proxy), sendingSIGKILL
signal to the container process inside the VM. - Wait for
kata-shim
process to exit, and return an error if we reach the timeout again. - Communicate with
kata-agent
(connecting the proxy) to remove the container configuration from the VM.
- Wait for
- Return container status.
Communication with the VM can be achieved by either virtio-serial
or, if the host
kernel is newer than v4.8, a virtual socket, vsock
can be used. The default is virtio-serial
.
The VM will likely be running multiple container processes. In the event virtio-serial
is used, the I/O streams associated with each process needs to be multiplexed and demultiplexed on the host. On systems with vsock
support, this component becomes optional.
kata-proxy
is a process offering access to the VM kata-agent
to multiple kata-shim
and kata-runtime
clients associated with the VM. Its
main role is to route the I/O streams and signals between each kata-shim
instance and the kata-agent
.
kata-proxy
connects to kata-agent
on a unix domain socket that kata-runtime
provides
while spawning kata-proxy
.
kata-proxy
uses yamux
to multiplex gRPC
requests on its connection to the kata-agent
.
When proxy type is configured as "proxyBuiltIn", we do not spawn a separate
process to proxy grpc connections. Instead a built-in yamux grpc dialer is used to connect
directly to kata-agent
. This is used by CRI container runtime server frakti
which
calls directly into kata-runtime
.
A container process reaper, such as Docker's containerd-shim
or CRI-O's conmon
,
is designed around the assumption that it can monitor and reap the actual container
process. As the container process reaper runs on the host, it cannot directly
monitor a process running within a virtual machine. At most it can see the QEMU
process, but that is not enough. With Kata Containers, kata-shim
acts as the
container process that the container process reaper can monitor. Therefore
kata-shim
needs to handle all container I/O streams (stdout
, stdin
and stderr
)
and forward all signals the container process reaper decides to send to the container
process.
kata-shim
has an implicit knowledge about which VM agent will handle those streams
and signals and thus acts as an encapsulation layer between the container process
reaper and the kata-agent
. kata-shim
:
- Connects to
kata-proxy
on a unix domain socket. The socket url is passed fromkata-runtime
tokata-shim
when the former spawns the latter along with acontainerID
andexecID
. ThecontainerID
andexecID
are used to identify the true container process that the shim process will be shadowing or representing. - Forwards the standard input stream from the container process reaper into
kata-proxy
using grpcWriteStdin
gRPC API. - Reads the standard output/error from the container process.
- Forwards signals it receives from the container process reaper to
kata-proxy
usingSignalProcessRequest
API. - Monitors terminal changes and forwards them to
kata-proxy
using grpcTtyWinResize
API.
Containers will typically live in their own, possibly shared, networking namespace. At some point in a container lifecycle, container engines will set up that namespace to add the container to a network which is isolated from the host network, but which is shared between containers
In order to do so, container engines will usually add one end of a virtual ethernet (veth)
pair into the container networking namespace. The other end of the veth
pair is added to the container network.
This is a very namespace-centric approach as many hypervisors (in particular QEMU)
cannot handle veth
interfaces. Typically, TAP
interfaces are created for VM
connectivity.
To overcome incompatibility between typical container engines expectations
and virtual machines, kata-runtime
networking transparently connects veth
interfaces with TAP
ones using MACVTAP:
Kata Containers supports both CNM and CNI for networking management.
CNM lifecycle
-
RequestPool
-
CreateNetwork
-
RequestAddress
-
CreateEndPoint
-
CreateContainer
-
Create
config.json
-
Create PID and network namespace
-
ProcessExternalKey
-
JoinEndPoint
-
LaunchContainer
-
Launch
-
Run container
Runtime network setup with CNM
-
Read
config.json
-
Create the network namespace
-
Call the prestart hook (from inside the netns)
-
Scan network interfaces inside netns and get the name of the interface created by prestart hook
-
Create bridge, TAP, and link all together with network interface previously created
=======
Runtime network setup with CNI
-
Create the network namespace.
-
Get CNI plugin information.
-
Start the plugin (providing previously created network namespace) to add a network described into
/etc/cni/net.d/ directory
. At that time, the CNI plugin will create thecni0
network interface and a veth pair between the host and the created netns. It linkscni0
to the veth pair before to exit. -
Create network bridge, TAP, and link all together with network interface previously created.
-
Start VM inside the netns and start the container.
Kata Containers has developed a set of network sub-commands and APIs to add, list and remove a guest network endpoint and to manipulate the guest route table.
The following diagram illustrates the Kata Containers network hotplug workflow.
Container workloads are shared with the virtualized environment through 9pfs. The devicemapper storage driver is a special case. The driver uses dedicated block devices rather than formatted filesystems, and operates at the block level rather than the file level. This knowledge is used to directly use the underlying block device instead of the overlay file system for the container root file system. The block device maps to the top read-write layer for the overlay. This approach gives much better I/O performance compared to using 9pfs to share the container file system.
The approach above does introduce a limitation in terms of dynamic file copy
in/out of the container using the docker cp
operations. The copy operation from
host to container accesses the mounted file system on the host-side. This is
not expected to work and may lead to inconsistencies as the block device will
be simultaneously written to from two different mounts. The copy operation from
container to host will work, provided the user calls sync(1)
from within the
container prior to the copy to make sure any outstanding cached data is written
to the block device.
docker cp [OPTIONS] CONTAINER:SRC_PATH HOST:DEST_PATH
docker cp [OPTIONS] HOST:SRC_PATH CONTAINER:DEST_PATH
Kata Containers has the ability to hotplug and remove block devices, which makes it possible to use block devices for containers started after the VM has been launched.
Users can check to see if the container uses the devicemapper block device as its
rootfs by calling mount(8)
within the container. If the devicemapper block device
is used, /
will be mounted on /dev/vda
. Users can disable direct mounting
of the underlying block device through the runtime configuration.
Kubernetes* is a popular open source container orchestration engine. In Kubernetes, a set of containers sharing resources such as networking, storage, mount, PID, etc. is called a Pod. A node can have multiple pods, but at a minimum, a node within a Kubernetes cluster only needs to run a container runtime and a container agent (called a kubelet).
A Kubernetes cluster runs a control plane where a scheduler (typically running on a
dedicated master node) calls into a compute kubelet. This kubelet instance is
responsible for managing the lifecycle of pods within the nodes and eventually relies
on a container runtime to handle execution. The kubelet architecture decouples
lifecycle management from container execution through the dedicated
gRPC
based Container Runtime Interface (CRI).
In other words, a kubelet is a CRI client and expects a CRI implementation to handle the server side of the interface. CRI-O* and Containerd CRI Plugin* are CRI implementations that rely on OCI compatible runtimes for managing container instances.
Kata Containers is an officially supported CRI-O and Containerd CRI Plugin runtime. It is OCI compatible and therefore aligns with each projects' architecture and requirements. However, due to the fact that Kubernetes execution units are sets of containers (also known as pods) rather than single containers, the Kata Containers runtime needs to get extra information to seamlessly integrate with Kubernetes.
The Kubernetes* execution unit is a pod that has specifications detailing constraints such as namespaces, groups, hardware resources, security contents, etc shared by all the containers within that pod. By default the kubelet will send a container creation request to its CRI runtime for each pod and container creation. Without additional metadata from the CRI runtime, the Kata Containers runtime will thus create one virtual machine for each pod and for each containers within a pod. However the task of providing the Kubernetes pod semantics when creating one virtual machine for each container within the same pod is complex given the resources of these virtual machines (such as networking or PID) need to be shared.
The challenge with Kata Containers when working as a Kubernetes* runtime is thus to know when to create a full virtual machine (for pods) and when to create a new container inside a previously created virtual machine. In both cases it will get called with very similar arguments, so it needs the help of the Kubernetes CRI runtime to be able to distinguish a pod creation request from a container one.
In order for the Kata Containers runtime (or any virtual machine based OCI compatible
runtime) to be able to understand if it needs to create a full virtual machine or if it
has to create a new container inside an existing pod's virtual machine, CRI-O adds
specific annotations to the OCI configuration file (config.json
) which is passed to
the OCI compatible runtime.
Before calling its runtime, CRI-O will always add a io.kubernetes.cri-o.ContainerType
annotation to the config.json
configuration file it produces from the kubelet CRI
request. The io.kubernetes.cri-o.ContainerType
annotation can either be set to sandbox
or container
. Kata Containers will then use this annotation to decide if it needs to
respectively create a virtual machine or a container inside a virtual machine associated
with a Kubernetes pod:
containerType, err := ociSpec.ContainerType()
if err != nil {
return err
}
switch containerType {
case vc.PodSandbox:
process, err = createPod(ociSpec, runtimeConfig, containerID, bundlePath, console, disableOutput)
if err != nil {
return err
}
case vc.PodContainer:
process, err = createContainer(ociSpec, containerID, bundlePath, console, disableOutput)
if err != nil {
return err
}
}
One interesting evolution of the CRI-O support for kata-runtime
is the ability
to run virtual machine based pods alongside namespace ones. With CRI-O and Kata
Containers, one can introduce the concept of workload trust inside a Kubernetes
cluster.
A cluster operator can now tag (through Kubernetes annotations) container workloads
as trusted
or untrusted
. The former labels known to be safe workloads while
the latter describes potentially malicious or misbehaving workloads that need the
highest degree of isolation. In a software development context, an example of a trusted
workload would be a containerized continuous integration engine whereas all
developers applications would be untrusted
by default. Developers workloads can
be buggy, unstable or even include malicious code and thus from a security perspective
it makes sense to tag them as untrusted
. A CRI-O and Kata Containers based
Kubernetes cluster handles this use case transparently as long as the deployed
containers are properly tagged. All untrusted
containers will be handled by kata Containers and thus run in a hardware virtualized secure sandbox while runc
, for
example, could handle the trusted
ones.
CRI-O's default behavior is to trust all pods, except when they're annotated with
io.kubernetes.cri-o.TrustedSandbox
set to false
. The default CRI-O trust level
is set through its configuration.toml
configuration file. Generally speaking,
the CRI-O runtime selection between its trusted runtime (typically runc
) and its untrusted one (kata-runtime
) is a function of the pod Privileged
setting, the io.kubernetes.cri-o.TrustedSandbox
annotation value, and the default CRI-O trust
level. When a pod is Privileged
, the runtime will always be runc
. However, when
a pod is not Privileged
the runtime selection is done as follows:
io.kubernetes.cri-o.TrustedSandbox not set |
io.kubernetes.cri-o.TrustedSandbox = true |
io.kubernetes.cri-o.TrustedSandbox = false |
|
---|---|---|---|
Default CRI-O trust level: trusted |
runc | runc | Kata Containers |
Default CRI-O trust level: untrusted |
Kata Containers | Kata Containers | Kata Containers |
The general guidelines for the Containerd CRI Plugin support is similar to the CRI-O support. You can run trusted workloads with a runtime like runc
and then run an untrusted workload with Kata Containers. The parameters that you can modify in the containerd config to run Kata Containers along with another 'trusted' runtime are the following:
# /etc/containerd/config.toml
[plugins.cri]
[plugins.cri.containerd]
# "plugins.cri.containerd.default_runtime" is the runtime to use in containerd.
[plugins.cri.containerd.default_runtime]
# runtime_type is the runtime type to use in containerd e.g. io.containerd.runtime.v1.linux
runtime_type = "io.containerd.runtime.v1.linux"
# runtime_engine is the name of the runtime engine used by containerd.
runtime_engine = ""
# runtime_root is the directory used by containerd for runtime state.
runtime_root = ""
# "plugins.cri.containerd.untrusted_workload_runtime" is a runtime to run untrusted workloads on it.
[plugins.cri.containerd.untrusted_workload_runtime]
# runtime_type is the runtime type to use in containerd e.g. io.containerd.runtime.v1.linux
runtime_type = "io.containerd.runtime.v1.linux"
# runtime_engine is the name of the runtime engine used by containerd.
runtime_engine = "/usr/bin/kata-runtime"
# runtime_root is the directory used by containerd for runtime state.
runtime_root = ""
You can find more information on the Containerd config documentation
The CRI Plugin supports the following annotation in a Kubernetes pod to identify as an untrusted workload
annotations:
io.kubernetes.cri.untrusted-workload: "true"
Kata Containers utilizes the Linux kernel DAX (Direct Access filesystem) feature to efficiently map some host-side files into the guest VM space. In particular, Kata Containers uses the QEMU nvdimm feature to provide a memory-mapped virtual device that can be used to DAX map the virtual machine's root filesystem into the guest memory address space.
Mapping files using DAX provides a number of benefits over more traditional VM file and device mapping mechanisms:
- Mapping as a direct access devices allows the guest to directly access the host memory pages (such as via eXicute In Place (XIP)), bypassing the guest page cache. This provides both time and space optimizations.
- Mapping as a direct access device inside the VM allows pages from the host to be demand loaded using page faults, rather than having to make requests via a virtualized device (causing expensive VM exits/hypercalls), thus providing a speed optimization.
- Utilizing
MAP_SHARED
shared memory on the host allows the host to efficiently share pages.
Kata Containers uses the following steps to set up the DAX mappings:
- QEMU is configured with an nvdimm memory device, with a memory file backend to map in the host-side file into the virtual nvdimm space.
- The guest kernel command line mounts this nvdimm device with the DAX feature enabled, allowing direct page mapping and access, thus bypassing the guest page cache.
Information on the use of nvdimm via QEMU is available in the QEMU source code