v0.1.0

v0.1.0

This release has been tracked through the 0.1.0 project.

Highlights for cloud-hypervisor version 0.1.0 include:

Shared filesystem

We added support for the virtio-fs shared file
system, allowing for an efficient and reliable way of sharing a filesystem
between the host and the cloud-hypervisor guest.

See our filesystem sharing
documentation for more details on how to use virtio-fs with cloud-hypervisor.

Initial direct device assignment support

VFIO (Virtual Function I/O) is a kernel framework that exposes direct device
access to userspace. cloud-hypervisor uses VFIO to directly assign host
physical devices into its guest.

See our VFIO
documentation for more detail on how to directly assign host devices to
cloud-hypervisor guests.

Userspace IOAPIC

cloud-hypervisor supports a so-called split IRQ chip implementation by
implementing support for the IOAPIC.
By moving part of the IRQ chip implementation from kernel space to user space,
the IRQ chip emulation does not always run in a fully privileged mode.

Virtual persistent memory

The virtio-pmem implementation emulates a virtual persistent memory device
that cloud-hypervisor can e.g. boot from. Booting from a virtio-pmem device
allows to bypass the guest page cache and improve the guest memory footprint.

Linux kernel bzImage

The cloud-hypervisor linux kernel loader now supports direct kernel boot from
bzImage kernel images, which is usually the format that Linux distributions
use to ship their kernels. For example, this allows for booting from the host
distribution kernel image.

Console over virtio

cloud-hypervisor now exposes a virtio-console device to the guest. Although
using this device as a guest console can potentially cut some early boot
messages, it can reduce the guest boot time and provides a complete console
implementation.

The virtio-console device is enabled by default for the guest console.
Switching back to the legacy serial port is done by selecting
--serial tty --console off from the command line.

Unit testing

We now run all unit tests from all our crates directly from our CI.

Integration tests parallelization

The CI cycle run time has been significantly reduced by refactoring our
integration tests; allowing them to all be run in parallel.