Intel Releases Cloud-Hypervisor 0.4 As Its Rust-Written VMM Built Off KVM

Friday marked not only the release of QEMU 4.2 for Linux virtualization but Intel's open-source crew developing the Cloud-Hypervisor as the Rustlang-based VMM built around Linux's KVM and VirtIO interfaces is out with a big feature release.

Cloud-Hypervisor took shape this year and has been quick to evolve since its inaugural release in July. Cloud-Hypervisor during its pre-alpha stage is catered to Clear Linux and Ubuntu while also focusing on x86_64 CPU support but AArch64 coverae is said to be coming in the future. Windows 64-bit guest support is also under evaluation.

Cloud-Hypervisor remains focused on being secure and high performance in yielding low latency and low memory footprint while also doing away with legacy features and only supporting modern software like just 64-bit support. With Cloud-Hypervisor 0.4 more features are in the works in stepping towards live migration capabilities and other modern features expected out of virtual machine monitors.

- Support for dynamically add virtual CPUs to guests via CPU hot-plugging.

- Support for Programmatic firmware tables generation.

- File-system and block devices vhost-user back-ends in their path to forming the default Cloud Hypervisor I/O architecture.

- Support for VM pause/resume support as part of working towards live migrations.

- The user-space IOAPIC implementation is used by default.

- Support for PCI device BAR reprogramming.

The Cloud-Hypervisor 0.4 release can be obtained from GitHub.