Cloud Hypervisor Integration
Cloud Hypervisor is an open-source Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) written in Rust that runs on top of KVM and MSHV. PiVirt includes dedicated integration for Cloud Hypervisor alongside pivirtd (QEMU/KVM), offering ultra-low memory footprint and sub-millisecond boot times for modern container and cloud-native workloads.
Comparison: QEMU vs. Cloud Hypervisor in PiVirt
Section titled “Comparison: QEMU vs. Cloud Hypervisor in PiVirt”| Feature | pivirtd (QEMU/KVM) |
cloudhypervisor |
|---|---|---|
| Language | C / Go wrapper | Rust / Go adapter |
| Legacy Hardware Emulation | Full (IDE, floppy, legacy PCI) | Minimal (virtio-only) |
| Boot Latency | ~500ms - 2s | < 50ms |
| Memory Footprint | ~30MB per VM overhead | < 5MB per VM overhead |
| Direct Kernel Boot | Supported | Optimized (vmlinux/PE) |
| Primary Use Cases | General Linux/Windows VMs, Talos, ESXi migration | MicroVMs, Serverless, Fast CI/CD workers |
Architecture Integration
Section titled “Architecture Integration”graph TD
Agent["PiVirt Agent"] -->|Hypervisor Interface| Backend{"Hypervisor Driver"}
Backend -->|Unix Socket / QMP| QEMU["pivirtd / QEMU"]
Backend -->|REST / OpenAPI| CH["cloud-hypervisor daemon"]
CH --> KVM["/dev/kvm"]
Enabling Cloud Hypervisor Backend
Section titled “Enabling Cloud Hypervisor Backend”In agent.conf:
hypervisor_type = "cloudhypervisor"cloudhypervisor_socket = "/run/cloud-hypervisor.sock"