Intel Cloud-Hypervisor 0.9 Brings io_uring Block Device Support For Faster Performance

Intel's Cloud Hypervisor focused on being a Rustlang-based hypervisor focused for cloud workloads is closing in on the 1.0 milestone. With this week's release of Cloud-Hypervisor 0.9 there is one very exciting feature in particular but also a lot of other interesting changes.

Most interesting with Cloud-Hypervisor 0.9 is IO_uring block device support, which works when the host kernel supports this modern Linux I/O interface. IO_uring has shown much potential and incredible adoption over the past year for faster asynchronous I/O on Linux by allowing ring buffers to be shared between applications and the kernels and other improvements with less kernel overhead.

With Cloud-Hypervisor 0.9, the hypervisor can make use of IO_uring for its block device implementation and it results in "a very significant performance improvement." Also on the performance front is Cloud-Hypervisor's release build is now built with Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) enabled for possible performance benefits but also around a 20% reduction in binary size.

Cloud-Hypervisor 0.9 also provides block and network device statistics, configurable CPU topology support, better snapshot/restore handling, VirtIO memory ballooning abilities, improved ARM64 support, Intel SGX support, and a variety of fixes and other improvements.

More details on this Intel-backed Rust-VMM project via GitHub.