Microsoft crafts Rust hypervisor to power Azure workloads

Microsoft earlier this month published code for a new hypervisor, or virtual machine monitor (VMM), written in Rust. OpenVMM is a type 2 hypervisor, which runs atop an operating system, as opposed to a type 1 hypervisor that runs on bare metal and interacts directly with hardware. Thus it has more in common with Oracle VM …

[bazza]

Are They Out To Eat Broadcomm's Lunch?

Just wondering if this has the potential to grow up as a viable alternative to VmWare. There's not that much difference between a Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisor, and it's not like MS hasn't got the right types of resources to build a Type 1 on the back of this. And, they've open sourced this one (thus far).

It could appeal to quite a few folk.

[Richard 12]

Re: Are They Out To Eat Broadcomm's Lunch?

Microsoft already have a hypervisor, and it ships with every copy of Windows.

This one is an experiment. Maybe it'll eventually ship, more likely it'll be discarded once they've learned whatever they hoped to figure out.

[theblackhand]

Re: Are They Out To Eat Broadcomm's Lunch?

I think it is unlikely to ever ship - it's attempting to provide a solution for Azure VMs to easily move between different hardware platforms or different hardware features without the need to build feature specific VMs (i.e. RISC-V vs ARM vs x86). There are significantly challenges to doing that efficiently so it may remain an experiment.

There is the possibility that some of the features mate it into HyperV or that HyperV is rebranded into a common brand with HyperV and OpenVMM, but this is unlikely to be targeted at on-premise solutions.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Will it run Windows 95 and Windows 98?

State in Hyper-V: Windows NT 3.51 and higher work, Win95/98 setup borks. I heard that NT 3.1 works too in hyper-v, but have not yet seen anything that confirms it.

[Roland6]

Re: Will it run Windows 95 and Windows 98?

“ The paravisor may additionally offer additional services such as emulated devices like a TPM [Trusted Platform Module] or device translation between the host and the unenlightened guest.”

This suggests a target is running W11 on old hardware, assuming the paracisor emulates TPM 2…

[collinsl]

Re: Will it run Windows 95 and Windows 98?

As long as you have the right CPU flags now for 24H2, otherwise it'll refuse to upgrade (as I've found out recently)

[barravince]

I don't get all this Rust based marketing, we have C and C++, good programmers can make software which is memory safe even with an unsafe language, no one needed Rust, no one cares if anything is written in rust.

[ecofeco]

Hype, vaporware, snake oil and Rube Goldberg new shiny(!) are an integral part of the digital tech biz world and have been for decades.

Common sense, reliability and robust usability is just crazy commie talk!