Announcing the open sourcing of OpenHCL

Since the early days of cloud computing, virtualization technologies have enabled computing workloads to run as virtual machines (VMs) in server environments. As hardware has become more sophisticated and new features have become available, the software stack has continued to run VMs. smoothlyThis is thanks to sophisticated advances in hypervisors and virtualization software.

confidential computing It is now a powerful technology that significantly improves the security of VMs running in the cloud. However, the trust boundary of confidential VMs imposes a barrier that prevents hypervisors from providing the rich virtualization services that VMs typically expect. Customers who want the benefits of Confidential VMs must update the VM’s operating system to the latest version, which should continue to be revised as Confidential VM technology continues to advance rapidly.

Microsoft says “paravisor“. The paravisor runs within a confidential trust boundary and provides the virtualization and device services required by a general-purpose operating system (OS), allowing traditional VM workloads to run securely and take advantage of innovative advances in confidential computing without the need for ongoing servicing by the OS. technology. As confidential computing becomes available and advances on more hardware platforms, The software stack can continue to run the VM. Smoothly thanks to the paravisor, Likewise, other advancements in virtualization software have allowed VMs to run seamlessly on ever-evolving hardware.

Introduction to OpenHCL

Microsoft developed the industry’s first paravisor and has been improving the paravisor available to Azure customers over the years. These efforts have now culminated in the release of a new open source paravisor called OpenHCL. We plan to develop OpenHCL publicly. microsoft/openvmm: Home of OpenVMM and OpenHCL (github.com).

Currently OpenHCL can run on both x86-64 and ARM64 platforms and supports: Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP Confidential computing platform. View OpenHCL user guide Check out the step-by-step instructions. OpenHCL provides a rich and powerful set of services for both confidential and non-confidential VMs.

• device emulation Via standard device interfaces such as: vTPM And cereal.
• device translation Via standard device interface.
• diagnosis.
• Support for guests that are not fully recognized, such as Windows and older versions of Linux – Runs through standard architecture interfaces.

OpenHCL is used in Azure. Used in the new Azure Boost SKU and in the future Confidential VM SKU. Last month alone, over 1.5 million VMs ran with OpenHCL on Azure.

Open for collaboration

There’s still a lot more we can do with OpenHCL, and we’d like to collaborate with you as we develop new features openly. You can learn more about OpenHCL in our extended blog. OpenHCL: A new open source paravisor – Microsoft Community Hub yes https://openvmm.dev. If you have any ideas or other feedback you would like to add to the OpenHCL roadmap, please contact us. you are GitHub IssuesContact us at Zulip and contribute to this project!

– Core OS platform team.