Microsoft Announces Open-Source Hyperlight For Embedded VMM Within Linux/Windows Apps

Microsoft last month announced the open-source Rust-written OpenHCL for running confidential Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP virtual machines. Today Microsoft is announcing another interesting open-source, Rust-based project in the virtualization space: Hyperlight. Microsoft's Hyperlight project is an embed-friendly, lightweight VMM for use within Linux and Windows applications.

Microsoft today publicly announced Hyperlight for virtual machine based security to execute small, embedded functions. Each function request with Hyperlight has its own hypervisor for protection. Hyperlight is a Rust-based library for executing functions as quick as possible while keeping functions isolated individually within VMs using either Linux KVM or Microsoft Hyper-V. Microsoft envisions Hyperlight being used everywhere from cloud services down to IoT and industrial use-cases.

Microsoft will be submitting Hyperlight to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a sandbox project. The Hyperlight code is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license and works on both Linux (KVM) and Microsoft Windows (Hyper-V) systems.

More details on the open-source Hyperlight project via the Microsoft Open-Source Blog. The blog post is dated 7 November but only appeared public on their RSS feed a few minutes ago. The code repository now public at GitHub.