Hey Virgo, this is Kelly from House of Virgo doing your next 24 hours love reading for Virgo's Sun, Moon Rising and Venus. Some of the messages may or may not resonate, just take a fit, leave the rest. If you would like to book a personal reading, there's a link in the description box below this video. All right Virgo, welcome to my channel. Please do hit like, share, subscribe if you're new and thank you for those of you returning. This is going to be a reading for Virgo's love, love life, whomever you may be connecting with or thinking about at this time. Okay, ah, you guys, there's the emperor. As per usual, showing up in your reading and the king of wands. Okay, this is the past position and the king of pentacles. Okay. Wow. Present is the empress. Goodness. Temperance. Page of wands. All right. And the future is the night of cups. The nine of cups. Wow. And the six of cups. Wow, Virgo. Wow. Let's get some romance angel messages to see what the energy is here. I love messages for Virgo. All Virgos, Virgo sun, moon rising, Venus. What are the love messages? What does Virgo need to know going forward here? Okay. Retreat. It's time to disconnect from the world. Okay. So Virgo, you might be taking a little time off or time out for yourself disconnecting or desiring to disconnect from the world. But as you can see, this is two people together.  Okay. Somebody that could be somebody who wishes for that with you or you wishing that with them or both of you. Okay. You also have express your love. Go ahead and make the romantic gesture. I feel like that card showed up yesterday. I believe there's a desire here to quality time spent together to expressing your loving feelings and emotions for one another. Okay. Romance, romance, romance. Okay. And oh, you have engagement. Wow. Your love life is ascending to a higher level of commitment. There may be engagement coming and I definitely am seeing that in the future with someone. Okay. I feel like there's some time. I feel like somebody wants to connect with you and spend some time with you to bring this love energy into this union. Okay. Let go of control issues. Allow the situation to unfold naturally. Okay. Don't sweat it, Virgo. That's what I'm just hearing. Just chill, relax, enjoy, be happy. It's divine timing. Allow things to just evolve. Okay. Unrequited love. There's not enough attraction or chemistry to keep this relationship going. Virgo, that's you. And you're kind of like having a hard time accepting that somebody could actually be in a position to love you. All right. Maybe you feel like, oh, it's not going to work out. It's or it can't work out. Okay. Or, you know, trying to control it by maybe sabotaging the relationship before it ends because there might be a fear of it, things not working out. Okay. See separation time apart from your partner is on the horizon. You know what? I feel like you've got somebody here who really wants to be with you and express how they feel about you and bring this union into a higher level to ascend this connection. But you are here like having a hard time letting this happen on its own. I feel like you might be trying to run away because you have a fear that your person's not attracted to you anymore or that there's not enough chemistry. And you may be in this position of wanting to separate from this person as of right now. Okay. Maybe there isn't any communication or anything going on at this time. But I feel like the message here is for you to have faith. Okay. If this isn't anyone in particular, this could just be have faith in general, right? That think positively about your love life in general to attract the love that you wish to have in your life. Okay. So the past energy, you've got the emperor, the king of wands and the king of pentacles. So there's definitely an element of maybe two suitors in the past. Now let's take a look at this emperor. So we do have Aries, Leo, Gemini, Virgo Taurus, Capricorn. I said Gemini. I don't know why. Sagittarius, Libra. Okay. I don't know why I said Gemini. There's nothing here. There's no card here. There's no swords. It's all wands and cups. So it's all passion and love. A passion and emotions. Okay. Very strange. Maybe some of you have Gemini placements or you're connecting with a Gemini. But let's take a look at what this emperor in the past represents. Okay. Pisces and energy. So this emperor comes across to me as someone who's very or was very open to seeing things differently or seeing the light or seeing things in your from your point of view. Okay. In the past. We also have the moon. Okay. I feel like this emperor also was kind of like trying to see past their own emotions and their own fears. All right. In the past this person probably did a lot of self deception. Usually the emperor is not an emotional person may have some elements of emotion to him. But I feel like this person may have had mostly the elements of fire and earth. Okay. Where this person was very grounded but very passionate. All right. The emotion I feel like with this person kind of scared them a little bit in the past. How they really like the depth of their feelings for you. Okay. I do feel like this person the two elements that they presented. One being of earth in the past was a very resourceful domesticated solid practical someone who was like a good investor with money and also someone who was a bold powerful leader very charming and courageous a bit feisty self assured and confident. Now they may have just presented these things outwardly. But what's missing here was their communication skills their way they there was a lack of communication and a lack of emotion. Right. This person had very deep emotions very deep and with that moon energy I feel like this person maybe tried to cover them up. Okay. I feel like in the past this person really didn't reveal much in or gave you much clarity about how they felt about you deep deep deeply. I'm not talking about just saying things here and there. I mean like deeply because I feel like this person didn't even know and once in a while they would become enlightened. Here's the Gemini card the magician. Okay. I feel like their intention with you in the past was to really manifest something with you here try to turn you know their action like it was kind of like they it's like they sat there and they knew that they needed to take action to try to create and turn their visions with you into reality. It's just the emotional connection and the communication was a bit off. The emperor is here again. Okay. Okay. This person might have been the father of your children in the past if you have children. But it feels to me like they they try to just stay in this boss up position. This person tried to like say hey everything's fine. I'm cool. I'm good. You know I got my money right and like I take action in my life and I'm bold and stuff but there was a lack of there was a lack of emotional vulnerability here and that might be why now this person is like seeing that that was what was missing in this relationship and I feel like if they could get you alone and if there could be some time with just you and them that they would definitely try to come forward and express how they feel about you but I don't know if something's holding them back at this time or held them back in the past but in the you know moving forward I feel like that's actually going to come about now the present energy is the empress temperance and the page of wants so you will get a message from this person but it will be I feel like your person is kind of like all right just waiting for the right time to communicate with you right they know that you are their other half you're presenting as the empress some of you could be on the cusp of Virgo Libra but you and they they know that you are their match okay the emperor and the empress go together they know that you are their match let's take a look look the king wants king wants us here twice the emperor is here twice so it's definitely fire element here okay there's times when your person like in the present may feel like they're not up to par to you and they maybe just really trying to get to a place where they can actually believe that they're worthy of you even though they do feel that they're worthy something about you they want so much to impress upon you that you know they do feel like you are their perfect match and I feel like they're going to express that to you going forward in the right time though okay the shadow side popped out yeah this person may be currently dealing with some addictions or you know that's devil energy maybe some obsessions or they have like some urges or things that they're trying to heal at this time because temperance does represent harmony and healing balance self control and moderation and I feel like this person is trying to like self moderate things that get them in trouble things that they've done or the way they've lived their life you know they may be easily tempted in a lot of ways and I feel like this person is trying to push back on that you know just like okay not become so obsessive even with you or other things in their life they're I just feel like they're trying to like balance and just take it easy here but there is communication coming and it's firing it's passionate communication coming from this person this person is quite smitten with you Virgo they feel that there's potential for growth here and I feel like they may want to communicate and talk about traveling or doing something together spending some time together yeah here's karma this is judgment reconciling with you and opening up they want to talk about this energy here retreating and expressing your love to each other and opening up this person wants to you know they want to get engaged they want to marry you Virgo this person is in this position of gaining their courage to come towards you and bring this to you in the future okay just let me tell you we have Capricorn as well and we have Scorpio energy in the future here comes the knight of cups there's definitely a proposal Virgo with the nine of cups and the six of cups this person you're all they think about this is a soulmate card the six of cups this is an energy of like there's they're thinking about the past they want to reconcile with the past with you do things differently with you let's take a look here your wish come true for them Virgo and they're gonna let you know that and they're gonna show that by way of this proposal that comes in with the knight of cups okay yeah ace of pentacles you want to offer a brand new opportunity you are you are there's no one compares to you Virgo for them okay I mean sure there's others out there but you are their soul you are the one who um when they think of you you're the one who has that um you know that innocence you know you're the one that has that kindness and that generosity and that sincerity that they need and that they love okay um I feel like they just had a difficult time really like going within and seeing how they feel and checking to see what their true emotions are I feel like this person just lived in a shadowy place with their emotions like dark or suppression of the emotions okay seven of pentacles is here at the nine of cups how to invest what to invest you know they wish to invest in this connection going forward um seven of pentacles energy that's like they're very patient okay and they're they'll wait for the right time you know to move things forward to be successful okay um they'll take their time with you um they're not going to push they're not going to rush this person just wants to uh there may be an apology or in the future them coming forward their apology may feel like something like they truly love you they want to be with you they want to give to you they want to make you happy they want to please you yep three of cups energy here again two reunion cards two reconciliation cards okay um connect with you apology for maybe others that were in um involved um in their life while maybe seeing you because the three of cards can be a card of like socializing you know I feel like they will tell you that um nobody meant nobody else meant anything to them they were more like casual friendship type acquaintances um but this person also views you as someone who is in their inner circle someone who is very supportive of them okay and I feel like this person needed that for you have such a kind heart in so many ways you know you're very sincere and you always seek to help and improve um and that's really all you ever want is the best for others okay and the best for your relationship and your partner um you're a sign of service so there are many nurses uh are people in the medical field who are Virgos um many people in you know volunteer positions okay how this person feels about you um passion try something you've never done before this person is definitely going to come forward and do something they've never done before with you or in a relationship or in love in general okay okay this person regrets lying to you or withholding their truth from you this person wants to be with you Virgo that's what this card is the I want you card all right leap of faith this person is taking a leap of faith here um they don't know how things are going to turn out but they know how they feel and they've recognized and acknowledge their feelings um I don't feel like you need to do anything this person like I said is going to go slow take their time to get to know you and allow you to get to know them better and blocks are being removed here all right this person it was my fault but I blamed you okay there was an element of fear there they didn't want to be either they blamed you or they blamed others this person did not want to take accountability um because they knew that they had temptations or urges or things that pulled them away okay um if this person left you it just feels like um it wasn't something that they truly wanted to do okay okay they couldn't tell you face to face how they truly felt Virgo okay sometimes I hear your voice in my head I don't know how that's possible but this person you know if you had communication with them they can still hear your voice they know the sound of your voice they know the sound it's almost like a song it's like a sweet song um all right let's take a look and see what other messages that are here for you Virgo so I would say there's communication coming for sure these blocks are being removed there's an opening up of expression of love and deepening a bond here okay they hope that you can forgive them one day for the decisions or the choices they made that didn't include you I'm hearing my life is not as together as it seems yeah this person probably put it on a lot of fronts um they like their presentation was no I'm cool everything's cool I'm good and that might have looked very attractive to you at first but I think you saw through that you probably are the only person that came close to seeing that because I feel like this person had a lot of blocks up and it feels like um you saw through that and you still love them anyway whatever they were trying to hide their insecurities I want to feel that way again okay they really just want to have that those loving feelings with you again okay and I feel like they know that the only way really um to do that is to open up they have regret they do they have a regret there is an element here that this person feels like they may have lost you or that it's done for good okay um I love you unconditionally I feel like that's what they're opening up to that you can't do anything wrong Virgo that no matter what that you might even beat yourself up but even within all of your imperfections this person loves you anyway what did I just say you came closer than anyone Virgo so this person does feel as if no one else was able to penetrate to the depths of their emotions and their heart the way you have and I feel like this person is like beginning to feel and see that and I truly believe there's going to be communication they want to come and spend a little quality time with you to tell you how they feel to express their love um to hopefully you will um express that back to them and that you will um you both I see this person wants to ascend um and go in deeper with you and make more of a commitment to you um or make a commitment to you even possible engagement or marriage okay you're that you're it for them Virgo you and they're coming to see this you may have known this all along but there's a part of you that's just like I don't know I haven't heard from them I think that it's done I don't think it's going to work out we're in separation perhaps now or maybe we should separate just wait I think things are going to shift and turn around once you get this message from this person all right Virgo so I hope that was helpful for you um please do hit like share and subscribe on my channel we've hit five thousand subscribers yay so thank you all for your support and I will see you guys um very soon take care


So my name is Andrea Lips. I'm an associate curator of contemporary design here at the museum, and I'm honored to moderate this discussion with Derek Lam, who is the winner of our Fashion Design Award, and Yvonne Puparev, who is the winner of our Interaction Design Award. So this is going to be fun, inspiring, and very fast. We have 20 minutes, which will do it.  So we are going to get started. Um, I wanted to focus on design and the body and thinking about both of your work. And specifically starting with you, Derek, of course, your work envelopes and engages the body very much. So tell us more about how you consider the body in your work. Are you seeking to reshape the body through the clothes that you make? And how do you consider other bodily sensations, if at all, with what you do? I think I have a preoccupation with making sure that a woman feels in touch with her body when she's wearing my clothes. So does she feel relaxed? Can she express herself through her body language and not be impeded by the clothing that I make? So a lot of times, considering specific areas that I concentrate on, for example, the shoulder is very important for me in terms of construction clothing so that she moves naturally. The hip area is really important to me so that she feels, again, she can express herself without speaking, so to speak, through the clothes. So hello. That's actually really interesting, because I feel like some of that even segs Ivan into what you and I were talking about even earlier in the trustee's room, because we were talking a lot about just self-expression and how so often we're able to talk without even saying words, that what is it, 93% of conversation, if you will, in communication is non-verbal. Right, in certain situations. Yeah, so it's interesting to even think about how just our clothing itself can really impact how the world sees us and how we're able to interact with the world. Yeah, I think especially if you're walking into a room, that first impact is understanding is she or he, both, able to express themselves without, like I said, without speaking, and people identify it, yeah. And to what extent are you, do you think about then the materials as well, the tactility or sometimes even, I have some pieces that make a sound, if there's kind of like a kind of a kind of rushing or something, do you ever consider any of that when you're making your pieces? Absolutely, I think all senses are kind of activated when you're wearing clothing and I do consider it. I find it really interesting when clothing makes too much sound because it's almost imposing onto an audience, orally. So I try to sometimes avoid things that are too noisy. Thank you, from all of us. So Yvonne, I also wanted to talk with you a bit about bodily sensation, bodily experience and how you leverage bodily experience to create new interfaces as well with what you do. Thank you. So in some ways, I think things we as interaction designers and developers do is similar to what Derek is doing, is that we're trying to communicate, is this instead of communicating with the others or with the physical world, we're trying to build systems to allow us to communicate with virtual and abstract constructs we create in digital domain, right? And I started thinking about this actually in the early 90s when I just started working on this interaction with my 20s, and this idea that was inspired by all this cyberpunk and all this science fiction stuff when you go and there's a virtual world and everything's completely artificial, how would you interact with that? Like how would you interact with something? And what I understand at that time is that we're already living in that world. The world of cyberpunk is here and it was here in the 90s. It's just we don't think it this way, right? Because we're using keyboards and mouses and it doesn't create the experience of being there. But we're already there. We're spending more and more lives in the world which we created through the computers. We are really living in virtual reality and less and less live in the physical world. So how can create interfaces which make our interaction with the virtual world more engaging and efficient and so it feels right? So and natural, yeah, natural because evolutionary we're not designed to live in the world of ideas, right? We live in the physical world with trees and stuff and stones. So how can we remap our physical body to be efficient in this virtual environment? That was kind of my thoughts almost 20 years ago. So I started in virtual reality and I quickly realized that technology is simply not there. So we can design and imagine a lot of things and come up with different ideas to create this kind of amazing interfaces where we simply don't have technology and then you know, you work with artists and designers and you create installations and media sort of performances but it felt always to me like one off. So that's why I kind of went on and said I'm gonna create those technologies myself and create those technologies which would allow me to start building these experiences. And it took almost 20 years. You know, it's pretty quick. I know, I know, it's depending how you. Okay. Yeah, so I think that's sort of that's, I think in a natural that's maybe kind of my approach is that, you know, as our life becoming kind of split between physical reality and the virtual reality which we're creating. And it's not questions what is good or bad. I'm not asking kind of moralistic questions about what was the right thing to do. It's just a fact. So, and we need to adapt to that. So I'm trying to build that opportunity for people to express themselves physically by being part of this virtual reality world. Well, and that's what's interesting too is thinking about the world as an interface, you know and the jacket you're wearing, you know is something that you can swipe up on and control your phone and there's a backpack. And you know, I mean, like it's so interesting to me as humans, you know, that there's still of course is this desire for tangibility for the physical world. I mean, that's what we know. That's what we feel and understand. But then there also is this access into another digital domain. That's exactly correct. You know, it's a tough challenge because as you completely correctly mentioned is that we're not... Oh my God, he just did it. Literally with his jacket. That's right. That's how I do it. That's so funny. Sorry. Good timing. See, it works. The DJ back there. Yeah, exactly. So this is a, it's played in dramatic music. Specifically for... So I think there's a question of how much we want to alter ourself and how much we want to create technology which allows us to map us into the virtual world, right? And you have people who go in so far ahead they find them surgically modifying themselves and then magnets too. You can feel radio waves and magnetic fields by magnets embedded into your body. Mostly art work, art world do this kind of stuff. People who are genetically modifying themselves. I was in Russia about a year ago and this whole camp of people who's trying to kind of like genetically modify themselves, artists. And they invited me to this camp and I said like, yeah, you guys later. I'm kind of busy. I'm not coming. How are they doing that? I think all the stem cells stuff, they inject the stuff in themselves. They control doses of radiation, infusing, mutation, crazy stuff. So I think the only place you can do this stuff is in Russia, I think, because they're just, they're crazy over there. But this is really far off, right? But it's not necessarily unimaginable, right? So at some point our ability to communicate with the digital world will be limited by what we can do. So we already have people seriously talking about brain-machine interfaces, right? That's what we do, right? We try to copy brain waves and see how we can remap our brain waves into things happening in physical reality, virtual reality. We also have an opposite directions where you have a lot of things become actuated through digital world, right? So now we have self-driving cars just to talk about the moment, right? So that's another big question that you were mentioning that that kind of gives you a little bit of, you know. Yeah, can I understand people's resistance to that because it is anxiety-ridden to understand, you know, how am I supposed to get around without being in control? And I think that what we're talking about is a new frontier of giving up some of our traditional control and being open to, obviously we're gonna be controlled somewhere or another. Yeah, well, and even let me ask, and let me ask you this, Derek, you know, I mean, for all of these efforts, and you know, we really do see our lives and our world now moving into this digital domain then, what is the value of physical experience, of tangibility? I think that tangibility is always going to be part of human nature. I think the conversation in terms of fashion right now is not so much about the touch and feel, but the ideas, whether it's the Me Too movement or just the minority women's rights. So those are very cerebral concepts that come through design and express through design. But I think that what's interesting is that maybe in this new world, we can let some of those kind of old world concepts that kind of bind us and find a new world, you know, that is not, that doesn't have this kind of stain on it that we have to fight against, I think. I think that's very interesting. Yeah, and we just mentioned, talk about what does it mean to be human, right? And now the question is, are we still humans, right? And this is not so simple as it seems because I was telling the story when I was working back in Disney, I was working in the animal kingdom, one of the parks which pretty much a zoo. And then we'll build these big interactive installations which play this kind of a computer-generated sounds. And there was an animal right next to us in one of those wild animal. And we had to stop it because the handlers told us that it's so stressed out it may die. So die from the sounds which is not familiar, right? So we don't die from sounds which is not familiar. So are we still human? Because I think the wild animals, they don't handle this really well. They don't really adapt to it. They're really programmed to live a certain life and everything different creates stress which is fatal. So that's what's... We die from our work, from our career. Exactly, you know? No, sleep, no, yeah. But slow death, it doesn't, this is the... We don't hear very well compared to other animals but we will die from our own journey. But I think that all of that is really interesting and that came up when we were talking about this book called Are We Human by Beatrice Colomina and Mark Wigley which very interestingly discusses this idea about design and how we're constantly evolving as humans and we're constantly designing for ourselves and for new humans. I mean there is a level of adaptability with our species. Exactly, I mean that's why we're here. That's why we're able to speak into this and talk about ideas and communicate. Yes. Some of us, not all of us. You know, and so stepping back a little bit and even thinking about embodied experience, work that engages the body, why is that valuable? Why do that? I want to pass it to you. Let's start with Yvonne. Well, I mean there is... The question why is probably the most complex question you can ask, right? Because it touches on the reasons like why we're living and why we're doing stuff. If you ask commercial entities, like if you're working for some big corporations, the value would be like what the user experience is, how well it sells your product, does it answer some user needs. It becomes very kind of boringly bureaucratically sort of, what's the KPIs, what's the sales number, how has improved the stock. So this is one why, right? So creating something which engages people and making them happy, they like products and they will use the products which design better and engage them on the physical level emotionally, better than if just explain them what it does, right? So I mean this is this angle. I find this is important of course and I would not argue against that but I think it's not the only reason I feel. I think in many reasons it's just kind of innate nature of people to push ourself, right? To innovate. We don't innovate because we have to. We innovate because it's we want to, right? The question is like why did you climb the mountain Everest? The first guy who was, I don't know, was some sort of something in England. Mr. Everest? Yeah. He had naming rights. He's like why did you climb the mountain Everest? His answer was because it's there, right? So similarly I think we try to understand ourself like in humans being fundamental and comfortable with the idea of being humans, you know? And we're trying to understand ourself and we do this by changing ourself and changing our experiences and trying to understand how these experiences evolve and society changes all the time. It's so complex. So I think this is combination of two factors, right? These are factors of basic needs and our needs are changing but also the factors that we just as humans it's in our nature to push us forward constantly as a species. I think a lot of times when we talk about ideas and we're projecting into the, we always talk about a group of people right now this whole obsession with millennials and then now we're talking about generation Z and there is obviously it applies as a collective but why do we need something that's tangible that is more individual is because within that group, let's say a millennial, if you're a disabled millennial so you have different needs and different requirements when it comes to fashion or transportation. So to understand that we're not just designing for a collective generation but we're also paying attention to the individual because that's really kind of how we experience the world. We don't always, we have our friends and we have our graduating class and we have our generation but at the end of the day, you're an individual and you're experiencing your life through your body and your body is very different from the next person. Yeah, absolutely. And it's actually interesting in Yvonne, your object investigation which was a little while ago in the trustee room you pulled up images of the Sony Walkman for instance and an early Sony transistor radio from 1957 and even thinking about that idea of radios and what it was and they used to be like pieces of furniture in our homes that you would sit around with your family and who's controlling who gets to turn that dial? It's the parents, you know and so all of a sudden when technology and such allows us to be more individual to make our own individual choices. I mean there still is something which is really inherently innately a part of us that we want to be in control and to express ourselves. Especially now I think again we're having this two conversation of a group of people. Again I use the example of millennials because it's such a hot topic right now and then there's the individual and how do I stand out? So every individual has their own story and everybody has their own way of engaging in the world and their history. And I think that those are two kind of poles in just contemporary conversations. What's the group? But let's not forget the individual, you know. We only have a couple minutes left. So I want to ask a question of each of you. So Yvonne, having now studied and practiced design for over 20 years what has design taught you? In one answer. I'm not a traditional designer. So I'm kind of working on an intersection of... My designs are so futuristic. I can't create them. So I end up creating technologies to kind of create my designs. Design for them is about communication. That's what design is about and everything is about telling a story. And I actually learned that mostly actually in the World of Disney Company when I was working for Disney because there is always what is the story? What is the story? What's the story trying to tell? It's always the story. When they build a park, they don't bring technology people in the room, they bring writers and, you know, animators and painters and that's how they create the first parks. So story and communications, I think, the design is about communication. And we communicate through many, many different tools. Clothing and everything else. I communicate through creating technologies for communication. This is my main observation. Derek, how about for you? I think as a designer, I come to... And I'm sure many people will say, I come more and more to realize that I know nothing. That I have my culture and I have my experience and I have my experience as someone who works in design. But at the same time, things can disrupt the conversation that I never thought about, even as something that seems so random or so different from fashion design, which is like income disparity or sustainability. And when you come across that and you realize, you know what, I never thought of that. And so what does that make me as a designer? Because I was thinking of my work from a different angle. So I tell new designers or young designers, I'm like, you just have to think harder. And part of it is thinking out of the box and saying to yourself, I know nothing. I can apply my experience, but it needs to be relevant. I guess relevance, especially someone in my age bracket. I'm not millennial. I'm like, I was like, what is this millennial pink? But it's humbling, right?   Yeah, yeah, I like that. So with that, yeah. So with that, thank you, Derek, Yvonne. And thank you, everyone.


Hi, lovely folks. My name is Shada Kawhi.  I have short black hair. I'm wearing geometric blue earrings, a chartreuse sweater, a black shirt. I am sitting today talking to you all in a patio. There's a tree behind me, and it's an absolute joy to be speaking with you all today about my new book, Crip Kinship. Crip Kinship is written as a love letter, an offering of disabled, queer of color survival teachings for our collective liberation. It's about sins and valid, the San Francisco Bay Area based performance project. It's written especially for fellow kin and community, and also for folks that might be learning about disability justice and ableism for the very first time. You can find Crip Kinship at the San Francisco Public Library, as well as your local independent bookstores. Thank you all so much.


All right. Hello everybody. My name is John Kohler. I'm a principal architect in Nutanix and I'm going to talk about optimizing KVM performance for electronic health record systems. Although the talk really isn't a health record system specific. So a lot of the methodologies and items we'll be talking about are valid for everybody. So quick agenda. We're going to talk about kind of what EHR systems are real quick, just for context settings. So everybody gets the acronym and then dive into a technical example. This is a technical conference. This is going to be a highly technical talk and I'll try to space it out enough where possible. So this practical example will focus on core KVM and then we've also got some related ecosystem enhancements that we'll be talking about as well. So what's an EHR system? EHR stands for electronic health record if you've ever been to a doctor. And seeing them type up your record digitally, they're probably running a system like the ones on the left here from the IT infrastructure side. There's a few things to know. One is that the ISV, which is the software vendor mandates the application architecture. So, you know, as good as architect as any of us might be, it kind of, it flows downhill. Right. So let's tell you what it needs to be and what the core systems behavior is going to be. A couple of key tenants here is that the provisioning and scalability of these systems are inelastic.  Right. So mistakes tend to have a long half-life. And the other thing just to kind of set your mind in the right place is that, you know, people touch this 24 seven, right on some of these use cases are life critical. So it goes without saying that tolerance for the system is running slow or the wheel is spinning is pretty much zero. And in that kind of clinical setting, sometimes you just can't come back to the computer later when the system comes back up and so on. So when you translate that all down to the infrastructure level, it just means you got to really pay attention to the details. So the moniker here is really it takes a village. So we're talking about optimizing performance for these platforms on top of KVM. We have to look at both KVM as well as all the other components that plug into KVM. And from the Nutanix perspective, we're just going to be focusing on our hypervisor, which is powered by KVM. So practical example. So maybe six months ago or so, I got a report from one of our EHR partners that one of the benchmarks that were running on top of our platform was slower than another platform. And so typical A-B testing hardware is the same. Processors the same. It's just not as quick on our platform. These are the types of things that we do with those vendors to make sure that we figure this stuff out at an engineering level before customers come and yell at us. And the benchmark that we're going to be talking about here is a pretty typical load runner type benchmark where you have some system, this happens to be running on Windows and it loads up synthetic users, does some work with the application and measures the response time as it ramps up. So from the core systems perspective, there's a lot of different ways to measure what's going on under the covers. I personally am very visual. I love flame graphs and using Linux Perf. If anybody in the audience or online is new to flame graphs, I have a copy paste example on how to generate this exact type of graph in the appendix. It's dead simple, so you can get it from the slide deck. So the simple question, which is rhetorical, is what's wrong with this picture? There are four key things wrong with this picture. One is that the stack that shows off the IPI delivery path call chain is not taking any fast paths, meaning you can see it is actually occurring outside of the VCP run loop, which is not great. And we can kind of infer that any sort of slowness that we're going to talk about in the next couple of points is kind of getting incurred on that path as well, meaning IPI delivery is slower than it should be. The second piece is when you're looking at a flame graph, anytime you see this wide kind of swath of a tabletop right here should set your alarm bells off because that means that that function itself is spending a lot of time doing either code inside that function or inline functions that is just taking up time, right, and not time spent actually going through the rest of the call chain. So each path of the VCP run is expensive, which is not expected. You can't see the name in here. If you actually go to the raw flame graph, you'd be able to click and highlight and look at this. But there's also about 1% of this graph, 1% of all samples done in this trace R due to X-save guest and host load, which is odd. And the last one is this absolutely hilariously large flat top for speculation control.  So we're going to get into where that comes from and how we can whack that. So let's dive in a little bit. I'll just kind of build this out. So for the first issue, this is, again, remember this benchmark is running on Windows. So the IPI delivery path is different for Windows than it is for Linux. Without going into the details, you can go and see many, many talks by Vitaly who's talked about Windows Enlightenments and so on. One of the Windows Enlightenments for emulating Hyper-V on top of KVM is called SynIC or Synthetic Interrupt Controller and the default for that enables something called Auto End of Interrupt Paravirtualization, which is a mouthful and it disables hardware acceleration like Intel APIC-V. And that's what we had configured here. It works all right. It's better than not having it enabled, but it's still less than ideal. In 5.15, there was some support added for a Enlightenment called HV-APIC-V, which enables hardware acceleration. However, for small Windows guests under 240 CPUs, the exit reason is actually APIC-RITE instead of MSR-RITE so they don't use the X2 APIC-ASR MSRs. So they don't actually have a fast path. That means that anytime an IPI is issued, even though the APIC IPIs are trap-like, it has to go all the way out of the run loop, then go through the handler leading to further delays. So the fix here for the specific benchmark is to switch over to hardware accelerated IPIs and Windows and also we've introduced a new APIC fast path handler, which I have the code for in the appendix. I got to send upstream, but it's incredibly simple. It just looks at the exit reason and handles it faster. For the rest of these things, I'm actually gonna call out how many samples these are in the graph itself. The IPI overhead isn't really a sample overhead from a flame graph perspective. It's just kind of coming out of the wrong place. The rest of these are actually just pure overheads. So that VCP run overhead that we described in the graph, which is kind of a long table, is multi-fold. One, keep in mind this hardware is ice-like based hardware, which from a mitigations perspective has enhanced IBRS, which is a set at once and forget it type of configuration. And long story short, the way that that enablement works in the kernel today, when the guest enables that we disable MSR bitmap and interception so that every single time the kernel exits it has to issue an expensive read MSR on spec control because the guest may have changed it even though the guest will never change it. There's also a regression here in the debug CTL restore mechanism. Architecturally, debug CTL MSR is zeroed on VM exits. So if you had set it on entry, you have to restore it on exit to go back to the host. It is regressed in 5.17 and below where it's setting it even though we at the host level didn't actually set it. So there's two fixes here. One is fixing the enablement and interception path for EIBRS and the second one is reverting the off-ending commit. And I've got the details for every single one of these including commits and such in the appendix. It'll keep it to a summary level for the sake of time. So we've got a bunch of cool stuff to talk about. The third bit is the XA of overhead. Now this one's kind of interesting. It's a bit of a mystery and took us a minute to figure it out. So if you look at the assembly, which you can do with, or should say disassembly, you can do with perf top. You can see here that the cost for this overhead is exclusively limited to the entry and exit doing an exit BV on the XA feature mask every single time. And that's because at Nutanix, the control point that we have will automatically mask out MPX and PKU features from the guest, which conveniently are Xavable features, which means that the host view of Xav and the guest view of Xav are different. Therefore, you gotta flip them back and forth constantly. Unfortunately, it's not just enough to just compile it out and go to a kernel config change. So there's some early initialization code we gotta mess with to get this to work properly so that the host mask will actually match our guest mask because we can't go change the auto masking feature because we're not going to mask in MPX or PKU to our guests. We're just not gonna do it. So we gotta fix the early initialization code, which we've got a sample for. And lastly for that fix for, this is actually the easiest one of all, which gets me so giddy because the upside of this is so large that essentially we also have a guest versus host mismatch here. And the issue actually comes from this kind of subtle nuance, right? The issue comes from the way that the mitigations are set up in 5.16 and below and QMU 2.11 and higher. QMU 2.11 and higher turns on set comp or sandbox on whatever flag is by default. And below kernel 5.16, any set comp jail will automatically get over-pessimized from a security perspective, from a mitigations perspective. So it ends up looking like from the host perspective that you have mitigations cranked all the way up.  The really devious thing here is that when you do a write MSR to spec control, completely styles the CPU pipeline. So it has to flush everything, flush all the speculative holds and everything. And it's really expensive. So thanks to our friends at Red Hat, they changed the default in 5.16 and above the deep-pessimized set comp jails because really that was all kind of window dressing. The commit message for that's really detailed is in the appendix. So into the kind of the spoiler results here, we could see that after we've done some optimizations, the flame graph looks a lot better, all right? So we've got a much shorter little tabletop here in vCPU run. We've got the call chain for handle apic write coming doing the IPI delivery in the vCPU run loop itself, which is great, which means the IPI delivery is happening faster. And if we build this out a little bit, these changes were, as specified, we've switched over to hardware-accelerated IPIs and added the new FastPath handler. And we've suppressed the expensive read MSRs and spec control and reverted a fending commit to make the tabletop for the vCPU run faster. The Xsave overhead is still there. It's just kind of a more nuanced fix. So, but when we get that done, we'll whack another 1% off of this as well, so we'll get some additional headroom. And you can see here that after that back port, the overhead for spec control is completely gone, which is great. On to the actual results from the application. So I've anonymized this to kind of protect the innocent. This graph here, this, I guess, reddish, orange-ish line, whatever it's coming across as on top is the baseline or previous and the bluish-greenish thing is the after. And there's a couple of key things to note. The little dashed line in here is the SLA ceiling, and it's kind of a fixed SLA type of thing. The y-axis is response time, the x-axis is user per core. And if you measure just where the line ends up hitting the SLA fall, we have roughly 14% better density with these improvements. So from the user perspective, just apply a hypervisor patch and boom, you got 14% better system. And the other thing I like to look at is that the steepness of the ceiling is our steepness of the line is quite a bit less, right? So as we degrade over the SLA fault line, the line there is quite a bit less steep. So if you were to compare, let's see, 10 users per core, so with this setup at the previous rate, you would see the gap in between these be astronomical. So it's quite a bit of a better response time and quite frankly, better tail latency. It's a good way to put it. But as I mentioned at the beginning of the talk, I realized that not everybody has to deal with healthcare applications. So let's talk about this in a bit of a more generic way, using a benchmark from LoginVSI, which is kind of emulating virtual desktops. And same type of load runner type idea.  It measures opening Excel, opening Internet Explorer, doing different operations and measuring response time. We do this also on an Ice Lake based system. And we're comparing here our previous release, which is 5.4 base and our current release is just 5.10 based and taking out hardware acceleration for the IPIs just because there's some enablement issues there that we'll talk about. And we can see here this really awesome graph from LoginVSI. I swear I can't change the color scheme on it. So it's blue and blue. It's just the way it outputs. But the top line, which is kind of going up into the ceiling is the previous release. The red line there is the kind of maximum ceiling for response time. And the bottom line is our current release. So you'll note very clearly, at 320 VMs per host, we don't hit the SLA ceiling at all, meaning that from a customer perspective, if you had 300 something VMs per host, you can get even better experience, better tail latency at full load, which is great. Onto these nice colorful graphs, which I can control the colors of. We can see what's called VSI base, which is a measurement of what the lowest single session response time is. Is quite a bit lower. The percentage there is about 9%. That means that even if you're not fully loaded, these optimizations will give you 9% better user experience, which is awesome. And the other thing we looked at is say, well, let's take away some of the automated ceiling stuff that this benchmark does and use to fix SLA kind of like the EHR benchmark does. So instead of having the SLA up at like 1800 milliseconds, we set it at 1200 milliseconds for this response time, this benchmark. And you can see the difference there quite a bit. So if we look at that, we can see the benchmark there. If you're gonna look at the X access, which is active sessions per host, it's below 256, this one's far above 256. And the actual numbers there, if you're doing a fixed rate threshold is 298 sessions, almost 300 sessions with the optimized kernel and 245 sessions for the unoptimized kernel, which is a 22% increase in response time at a fixed rate, which is pretty good. So zooming out for some related ecosystem enhancements. So as I mentioned, it kind of takes a village, right? So in our hypervisor for networking, we run OpenVSwitch and there's both Windows and Linux guests. So I wanna talk through some findings and methodologies that we've seen in these guys. And the first one in OpenVSwitch is a thundering herd problem. So I try not to read through this. I put this just big dump of detail, really more for slide consumers. But the short of it is OVS has a thundering herd wakeup problem. And the challenge for CPU sensitive workloads like EHR workloads, but it could be anything like SAP HANA or other database workloads, is that when that thundering herd blasts up, if you have anything in a halt polling loop, one of the exit conditions for KVM halt polling is single task running. So you'd have stuff in your run queue and you could potentially have less than ideal polling, which is what we saw. And the issue there is that there was a change back in the day to optimize the wakeup pattern for OVS. It was all well-intentioned and good, but it just made it actually go into a thundering herd. We found this in an interesting way, which is using Google Skedviz. If you've never used Google Skedviz, I know there's plenty of Googlers out here, so they may have already used it. But Google Skedviz is really, really quite slick. Visualizing things like wakeups and migrations and interactions of this low-level scheduler itself is incredibly hard. If you've ever tried to F-trace that, you get a massive output and it's really difficult to visualize and understand what's doing what. Skedviz does all this stuff for you. So we can see in here, we've taken a Skedviz trace from a host. The details aren't super important, but what we can see in here is there's a little search command. We search for the handler threads, those are the OVS handler threads. We can visualize them with this little color-coded rainbow doodad on the left, and we see, bang, there's a thundering herd, right? All of these threads are waking up at the exact same time and kicking all of the applications off the cores like that, and that's bad. Now that is fixable with both a kernel and OVS fix. It's one of these things that has to be done on both sides, or it doesn't work. I have the links to the commit series in the previous slide. But the net of it is a 28x, 28x reduction in wakeups, which is awesome for latency-sensitive workloads. So if you're running the affected kernel in OVS versions, you want to get this patch on board like ASAP. Another issue which I upstreamed, I actually just got committed yesterday, conveniently, is OVS communicates over a net link to the kernel to get some statistics, and actually, excuse me, it communicates over the kernel the net link to do all sorts of different things. One feature of net link is it just automatically gathers all these statistics, which is all well and good, it's all good, but on really big systems, like what you might find for quad socket or eight socket systems for SAP HANA, there's some of those calls in the kernel are linear in complexity based on the amount of cores, and it's really expensive. To the point where the OVS vSwitch daemon just sits on the CPU constantly and sucks away a core, and when you have CPU-sensitive applications like EHR or whatever, that loss of a core is kind of expensive, especially when you're thinking about it at scale. So there's two key improvements here. One of them is the one we just committed to OVS yesterday to align some of the stats gathering, reduces CPU and OVSD, or excuse me, vSwitch d, and then there's also a commit to inline some of the expensive stats getting calls, which does help, but it doesn't completely eliminate the issue, so you need, it's another one of those things where you need both to actually kind of whack this on large systems. And in true form, I love my flame graphs, and clearly when you take a flame graph, this issue stands out like a sore thumb. You can see that OVS's bridge run function here is doing all sorts of whatever, and it's just spending all this time on this Inet, Fill, Link, AF, whatever that is, getting stats, but the thing is, it's not actually reading any of those stats when the call returns, so it's just completely pure overhead. So we get rid of that with the commits mentioned, and wouldn't you know, a little purple search field here in the flame graph goes down from 4., or excuse me, 42.2% of samples to 9.4% of samples. So a big time tax cut. Last two bits here, one of them is Linux, VertiO related. This isn't throwing any tomatoes at our friends at Red Hat, but prior to Red Hat 7.8, Multi-Q didn't actually work for VertiO, SCSI, where if you had a Multi-Q enabled backend, it would just funnel everything to one queue. So you can see here, we use Vhost, or Vhost user SCSI in Tanix, to do out-of-tree PCI management. That process happens to be called Frodo, Frodo is the keeper of the rings, yes. So that's where that comes from. And you can see here in the top trace that very simply, one thread is doing all the work, and that's ridiculous. So we reported that up to Red Hat, and thankfully, it was just a simple cherry pick on their side. And so Red Hat 7.8 and what have you and above, now works much better, which is great. Last bit I have before I get into some of the appendix stuff if I still have any time and I'm running short on it, is a large IO and Windows. So this is one subject I'm incredibly passionate about, is that one of the benchmarks that one of our EHR partners has, basically goes through and does restore backup, some ETL stuff, and emulates a database workload. And large IOs in the back of the restore sections, this didn't work very well. And we ran into some issues getting that to work cleanly and actually have it come across to our storage backend as a one mega O instead of like concatenating 256 KIOs. And the fix there was multi-fold, there's kind of three different commits that have taken a whack at making large IOs work in the driver, which is great. The last one, which shows upstream earlier this year is one that we put up there to fix the maximum transfer length handling so we can kind of cleanly get a one mega IO, not like a one mega and five 12 KIO or something. And the kind of money slide here is this one, right? Where the requirement of this application is to be able to back up at line speed and now we can back up at 100 gigs per second out of this application with 100 gig, the Melanox, CX6, whatever. And so the benchmark comes nice, clean and flat with 512 K right restore IOs and it's hitting some line limitations there around a paltry sum of 12 to 13 gigabytes per second blistering. The last thing I'll bring up here, I know I've just got a minute, is that technically this actually breaks the Verdeo spec because the way that Windows Driver works is use indirect descriptors and long story short, you're not supposed to be able to do that. So we've got a PR upstream to fix that in the Verdeo spec and we'll route that back and make it work but I think that's the last of it. So I probably have maybe 30 seconds left if anybody wanna does a speed run question or catch me afterwards. Yes, sir. Yes, so there's a, I don't have the slides in here but we have a extensive performance CI that Nutanix that looks for these types of things, yeah. And the EHR benchmarks are a part of that but it's always, it's one of these things where you can look at benchmark results and they might look good in hindsight but they're not necessarily also having a CI across like competitive platforms as well. So those were those kind of late, late binding things might come in but the question was do you have a CI for that and the answer is yes we do. Well, I think we hit it exactly on the mark, it's 25 minutes. So that's all I got, yeah. There's appendix slides, has all the details, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but you can get those later. Cool.


What was that? Jason, I know this month has a Friday the 13th, but really, look, if you have to use the chainsaw on me, can you at least wait a few minutes? I'm in the middle of playing Best Fiends, and I've almost conquered this level. In fact, you would probably be in a lot better mood if you played Best Fiends. Why? Well, because it's a really fun puzzle game, and whenever I'm feeling murderous, it really calms me down. What with all the cute little fiends helping me to conquer the levels, going after the challenges, and the constant updates always makes it fresh to play. I'm about to finally beat level 4,383, so if you just give me a few minutes. No way! Get your own Best Fiends to play. It's free to download, you know, just grab a mobile device from one of your previous victims and download it. In fact, you get $5 off of in-game rewards once you reach level 5, which is super easy, even for you. No, not friends. It's Best Fiends. It's like friends, but without the letter R. Best Fiends. You're welcome, Jason. Now, can you please put down the chainsaw? Thank you.


Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another book review.  So it's a Stephen King themed video. This is a spoiler free review of Salem's Lot by Stephen King. Sorry about the hat. It was way too dark so I decided to go ahead and cut the video and change it out. But yeah we're talking about Salem's Lot today. This is, in my opinion, again no spoilers. Spoiler free zone. I will be uploading a spoiler discussion for this book all the way next week. I read this one with my good friend Isaac, if you guys know him from chat, as Sylvainus. Something like that. Me and him read it over the course of a couple of weeks. I had a lot of fun. He seemed to enjoy it also. But this is, in my opinion, the best vampire novel ever written. A close second of that would be Let the Right One In. This book is not great because of vampires. This book is great because of the characters and the story and the implications. For me the implications at the end of the book. It's the first time I ever read anything. And yes there's allusions to Dracula. There's allusions to I Am Legend. But it's the first time that I ever read a vampire story where the scope was so big. I'm trying not to give spoilers. But of course the book happens in Jerusalem's Lot, which is known locally as Salem's Lot. Jerusalem was the name of a pig. And you actually get more of that information in either, I think it's the story, Jerusalem's Lot in Night Shift, or it might be One for the Road. I can't remember which one. But both of those stories have to do with the same town. So you got three different things that pop up here. And also it ties in one of the characters in this one. Father Callahan shows up in the Dark Tower as well. That's in the description. So I don't consider that a spoiler. This book has one of the greatest endings of all of Stephen King's books. I think it also has one of the most awkward sex scenes he's ever written. In fact when people mention how bad Stephen King is at sex scenes they usually point at this book and I have to agree with them. One of the things that I really love about this book has nothing to do with the book. The old Toby Hooper television miniseries is fantastic in my eyes. I think there's two things that I thought they got right. And that was the character of Mike, I believe, whoever the guy that the grave digger. That character is terrific and is one of my favorite characters in the book. Another thing I appreciated was the relationship between Ben and Mark. That relationship there, that father and son kind of dynamic. I really enjoyed that. But Susan is a problem for me. I'm not going to lie, Susan has always been a problem for me. I've never liked the character. I don't like the love story. I do however like her story arc, how she ends up. That side I really enjoyed that aspect of it because I didn't like the characters. But everybody else, the doctor, everybody else is great as well. Especially, was it Mark's? I always get them confused. Is Mark the author or is Ben Mears and then Mark something or other? Ben Mears is the author, I believe. Mark is the kid. The Glitch Brothers, the Glick, that's all folks. For fuck's sake man, come on, get your words out. The Glick Brothers and Mark Petrie. Sorry, I forgot his name there for a second. Mark Petrie, I loved that whole aspect of it. They come around to create one of the scariest scenes in all of cinematic history, I think is in my opinion anyways, in Salem's lot, the miniseries. But even in the book, now this is one of those rare occasions where I saw the movie or the miniseries. I saw that before I actually read the book. I think I want to say probably not, it's probably a Mandela effect. I probably don't actually remember this. But I want to say that I actually watched it live on television when it first came out. Now, if that's not possible, I apologize because I was born in 1980. I'm not sure when the Hooper film miniseries came out. But I seem to remember watching it and being just utterly terrified. And even to this day, I went back and I watched it with my kids recently. And it holds up, man. It really does hold up, especially for me. Now, there are scenes that are terrible, terrible looking in the movie. But for the most part, the film, the miniseries is fantastic. Now, the book, there's some major changes and whatnot, especially to the way that the main vampire looks. And I say the main vampire because I can never remember which one's Straker and which one's Barlow. I want to say Straker is the antiques dealer and Barlow is the vampire, but I can't remember. There's so much in this book that has to deal with Dracula lore that it really doesn't do anything for me. But it's funny because I actually got an argument a couple years back. I've never read Dracula, never even been able to sit through like the movies that are closest to the book. I actually got an argument. I was like, just because it's got vampires does not mean that Stephen King was doing a tribute to Dracula. Well, he was. I mean, I have since listened to the audiobook. I think it's Alan coming or is it Tim Curry? I can't remember who does it. But the audiobook for Dracula is fantastic. And I actually got a chance when I finished that, I read Saint-Om's Lot right after it. And I saw this similarity. So if the person that I had the discussion with all those years ago, if you're watching this, I apologize. I'm sorry. Anyways, but I never realized how many points, it's like ticking off a checklist deal that King does, going through how Barlow, I'm pretty sure Barlow gets there, having the Renfield character, having the Mina character, having the Jonathan Harkin. I can't remember. The Jonathan character. All these characters mirror characters from Dracula. And it's not really a parody or satire or whatever. But it also doesn't feel like a ripoff.  But that felt a little too close to home. With what King did, creating this whole town and all of the little side characters and all the stuff that's going on with that, I think that made it the better of the two experiences. I think he elevated Dracula. I think he did one better than Stoker. That's my opinion. I feel like this is the best vampire novel ever written. Now, I'm sure there'll be plenty of people who disagree. I know there's loads of people who enjoy Let the Right One In more than they like this one, or any number. I am legend. People bring that one up all the time. I wasn't a fan of it. But I really, really love this book. And it's in my top 10 Stephen King novels. But overall, I think that the experience is a vastly superior one, like I said, to any other vampire novel. But it does have its issues.  You might not like Susan. I know I didn't. There's some other characters. There's some very cliche moments and scenes that you find a lot throughout the Stephen King universe, especially in the small town main setting. You have all these issues, but I do feel that the good outweighs the bad to the umpteenth level. I feel like there's so much great stuff in this book that it has surpassed Dracula, in my opinion, anyways. But have you read St. Louis's Lot? Did you like it? Did you not like it? Let me know down there in the comments below. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been another Stephen King book review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!