RustyVisor

A hypervisor written in Rust.

The goal of this project is to learn more Rust and determine whether Rust is a significant improvement over C for systems programming tasks like implementing hypervisors.

This project takes the form of an Linux Kernel module which loads an x86_64 type II hypervisor which virtualizes the original host operating system. After inserting the module, Linux will be running inside a VM as a guest, and the host operating system will be RustyVisor!

Getting Started

Launching Vagrant

A Vagrantfile is included to aid development and testing. It requires libvirt, QEMU, and the vagrant-libvirt plugin. Additionally, your system must support NFS and nested KVM.

To launch the Vagrant box, simply run vagrant up in the repo root and cross your fingers. Once launched, access the VM with vagrant ssh, and cd to /vagrant. You can then build and launch Rustyvisor as described below.

Installing dependencies manually

RustyVisor depends on nightly Rust, Xargo, GCC, and the Linux kernel module development headers.

To install the Linux kernel headers and GCC on Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) gcc

On Fedora you can use:

$ sudo dnf install kernel-devel-$(uname -r) gcc

And for Arch Linux:

$ sudo pacman -S linux-headers gcc

Next install the nightly rust toolchain:

$ # Bootstrap rustup to get a nightly build of Rust.
$ curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
$ source ~/.cargo/env
$ rustup install nightly
$ rustup default nightly

To build Rust code for kernel context we use the cross compilation tool Xargo:

$ rustup component add rust-src
$ cargo install xargo

Building the hypervisor

$ make

Running the hypervisor

Your Linux kernel may already have KVM installed. If so, we have to remove it first.

$ ./scripts/remove-kvm.sh
$ sudo insmod rustyvisor.ko
$ sudo rmmod rustyvisor.ko

Contributions & Bugs

Pull requests welcome! This is a project in part to learn about Rust, so if there is code which isn't idiomatic, please feel free to show me a better way.

Please file bugs and find bugs to work on at GitHub.