AMD Joins The Cloud Hypervisor Project Started By Intel

Over the past three years one of Intel's many promising open-source software projects has been the Rust-written Cloud Hypervisor. Cloud Hypervisor started as just a modern, security-focused, cloud-centric Rust VMM hypervisor for modern hardware/software. It began as just one of many open-source software projects at Intel but last year was folded into the Linux Foundation umbrella while Intel continues to be a major contributor to the project. Coming as a bit of a surprise today is AMD announcing they have joined the Cloud Hypervisor project.

AMD has joined the Cloud Hypervisor Project as a member on the advisory board. AMD joining this Rust-written VMM open-source project started by Intel isn't entirely surprising though considering it's started gaining some industry traction. Additionally, going back to 2020 was experimental AArch64 support and Arm ultimately has become a prominent contributor to Cloud Hypervisor. In setting the sights beyond just Linux VM use, Microsoft is another prominent contributor to Cloud Hypervisor and ensuring good Windows / MSHV support. Now AMD has a stake in Cloud Hypervisor and will be ensuring that their EPYC processors and their features are well supported by this virtualization hypervisor.

The notable list of organizations openly backing the Cloud Hypervisor in addition to AMD include Alibaba, Arm, ByteDance, Intel, Microsoft, and Tencent. The open-source project has certainly been on an interesting trajectory and I've written about it in dozens of articles while it will be even more interesting now to see what investments AMD makes into the project.

The basic details of AMD joining the Cloud Hypervisor project can be found via the LF press release.

It looks like this week could be busy on the AMD server front as in addition to the Cloud Hypervisor announcement, AMD recently revealed that on 10 November they will be launching their next-gen "Genoa" processors.