Qualcomm Continues Working To Upstream Gunyah Hypervisor Support In Linux

Near the start of 2022 engineers out of the Qualcomm Innovation Center posted Linux driver patches for their Gunyah hypervisor. Gunyah is an open-source type-1 hypervisor developed by Qualcomm with an emphasis on security and other features. More than one year later the Gunyah drivers have yet to be upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel but work on them persists.

Sent out last week was the 12th round of patches for bringing up the Linux kernel drivers for supporting this Gunyah type-1 hypervisor. Gunyah continues to be promoted as offering "strong security" especially for mobile use, high performance while also taking into account battery life considerations for mobile devices, and this hypervisor also being modular for customizability depending upon intended use-cases. Gunyah currently only supports ARMv8.2+ hardware. The hypervisor itself is open-source under a BSD 3-clause license and can be found on GitHub.

In the past year since previously writing about Gunyah and the Linux driver upstreaming work, the Qualcomm Innovation Center engineers continue working to get the drivers into shape for mainlining. The newly-posted v12 patches square away more issues that were raised during code review, various cosmetic code tweaks, and other refinements made over the past month.

Those interested in the work being done for the Linux kernel around Qualcomm's Gunyah hypervisor can see this patch series for more details.