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KVM based tiny x86 hypervisor written in pure golang, which can boot Linux

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bobuhiro11/gokvm

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gokvm is a hypervisor that uses KVM as an acceleration. It is implemented completely in the Go language. With only 1.5k lines of code, it can boot Linux 5.10, the latest version at the time, without any modifications (see v0.0.1). It includes naive and simple device emulation for serial console, virtio-net, and virtio-blk. The execution environment is limited to the x86-64 Linux environment. This should be useful for those who are interested in how to use KVM from userland. The latest version supports the following features:

  • kvm acceleration
  • multi processors
  • serial console
  • virtio-net
  • virtio-blk
  • PVH Boot Protocol

This is an experimental project, so please do not use it in production.

demo

CLI

Extract the latest release from the Github Release tab and run it. Before running, make sure /dev/kvm exists. You can use existing bzImage and initrd, or you can create them using the Makefile of this project.

tar zxvf gokvm*.tar.gz
./gokvm boot -k ./bzImage -i ./initrd  # To exit, press Ctrl-a x.

Go package

This project includes a thin wrapper for the KVM API using ioctl. Please refer to the following link to use it.

https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/bobuhiro11/gokvm

Reference

Thanks to the many useful resources on KVM, this project was able to boot Linux on a virtual machine.