OpenBSD Is Getting Its Own Native Hypervisor
The OpenBSD Foundation has been funding work on a project to provide OpenBSD with its own, native hypervisor.
The hypervisor's VMM is so far able to launch a kernel and ask for a root file-system, but beyond that, it's been laying most of the hypervisor foundation up to this point.
In terms of why OpenBSD is developing their own virtualization hypervisor rather than using a number of ones currently available on other open-source platforms, "for various technical reasons, choosing to port an existing vmm just didn't make a whole lot of sense. For example, I've been baking in support for things that the other implementations don't care about (namely i386 support, shadow paging, nested virtualization, support for legacy peripherals, etc) and trying to backfit support for those things into another hypervisor would probably have been just as hard as building it from the ground up."
The OpenBSD hypervisor should work with any Intel/AMD CPU supporting hardware virtualization and should be capable of any OS supporting VirtIO-based devices.
More details can be read via the hypervisor announcement by Mike Larkin. He hopes to have the OpenBSD hypervisor ready by the end of October.
The hypervisor's VMM is so far able to launch a kernel and ask for a root file-system, but beyond that, it's been laying most of the hypervisor foundation up to this point.
In terms of why OpenBSD is developing their own virtualization hypervisor rather than using a number of ones currently available on other open-source platforms, "for various technical reasons, choosing to port an existing vmm just didn't make a whole lot of sense. For example, I've been baking in support for things that the other implementations don't care about (namely i386 support, shadow paging, nested virtualization, support for legacy peripherals, etc) and trying to backfit support for those things into another hypervisor would probably have been just as hard as building it from the ground up."
The OpenBSD hypervisor should work with any Intel/AMD CPU supporting hardware virtualization and should be capable of any OS supporting VirtIO-based devices.
More details can be read via the hypervisor announcement by Mike Larkin. He hopes to have the OpenBSD hypervisor ready by the end of October.
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