Intel's Cloud-Hypervisor 0.11 Adds Windows Guest Support

Intel has a shiny new feature release out of their open-source Cloud-Hypervisor that runs atop KVM and leveraging the Rust programming language.

Cloud-Hypervisor 0.11 comes with some prominent improvements for this increasingly used component in the open-source Linux virtualization stack. As mentioned, even Microsoft has been working with Cloud-Hypervisor among other IHVs and ISVs.

With Cloud-Hypervisor 0.11 the highlights are:

- The existing IO_uring back-end is now enabled by default for VirtIO-Block. This default change allows for much better performance when running Cloud-Hypervisor 0.11 on Linux 5.8 or newer.

- Recently Intel engineers and others have been working on bits around Windows guest support while Cloud-Hypervisor 0.11 is the first release having officially supported Windows guest support.

- The AArch64/ARM64 code has snapshot/restore support now implemented.

- Faster boot time of the Linux kernel thanks to various optimizations.

- Experimental virtio-watchdog support.

- Many bug fixes.

This release has seen contributions from Microsoft, Google, and ARM, in addition to Intel.

Downloads and more details on Cloud-Hypervisor 0.11 via GitHub.