Abstract

rust-vmm is an open-source project, born in January 2019 with ambitious goals: 1) design and implement a set of safe, secure and efficient virtualization building blocks, 2) reduce code duplication across existing Rust based Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs) and 3) improve the security and quality of existing Rust based VMMs.

The purpose of rust-vmm is to provide a foundation of virtualization crates that other projects can use for rapidly developing virtualization solutions. The rust-vmm project empowers the community to focus on their product key differentiators rather than re-implementing common virtualization components like KVM API wrappers, Virtio based device models and Virtual Machine memory libraries.

In this talk we go over the fundamentals of building VMMs and why we believe Rust is the right programming language for this project. We look at how different open source projects use rust-vmm crates to build virtualization products and prototypes while outlining both the advantages and the trade-offs. In the end we try to answer the controversial question: “Does the world need more VMMs?”