The Linux Foundation announced that it will host the Cloud Hypervisor project, which delivers a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) for modern Cloud workloads. The project is supported by Alibaba, ARM, ByteDance, Intel and Microsoft.
The project is written in Rust and focuses on security features such as CPU, memory and device hot plug; support for running Windows and Linux guests; device offload with vhost-user; in addition to a minimal and compact footprint.
The project focuses on exclusively running modern, cloud workloads, on top of a limited set of hardware architectures and platforms, ones with modern operating systems with most I/O handled by paravirtualised devices (i.e. virtio), no requirement for legacy devices, and 64-bit CPUs.
“Cloud Hypervisor has grown to the point of moving to the neutral governance of The Linux Foundation,” said Arjan van de Ven, Intel Fellow and founding technical sponsor for the project. “We created the project to provide a more secure and updated VMM to optimize for modern cloud workloads. With fewer device models and a modern, more secure language, Cloud Hypervisor offers security and performance-optimized for today’s cloud needs.”
Cloud Hypervisor supports the ‘x86-64’ and ‘AArch64’ architectures. Cloud Hypervisor supports booting disk images containing all needed components to run cloud workloads, a.k.a. cloud images.
Additional details on the project are available on its GitHub page.
