[Announcement] Karma VMM first public release

[Matthias Lange]

We are happy to announce the first public release of the Karma Virtual
Machine Monitor [0].

Karma is a virtual machine monitor (VMM) that runs Linux in a virtual
machine on top of the Fiasco.OC [1] microkernel. Its main design
directives are speed and simplicity. Unlike KVM, VirtualBox or VMWare,
Karma does no emulation, but resorts to aggressive paravirtualization
and therefore has low complexity and shows superior performance for a
number of benchmarks.

Karma requires hardware assisted CPU virtualization. A feature that is
available on all recent x86 CPUs (SVM or VT). Optionally, it can make
use of hardware assisted memory virtualization (Nested Paging or ePT),
if available.

The Karma VMM is currently being used as a research vehicle at
Technische Universität Berlin and Technische Universität Dresden.

It main features are:
- Trustworthy isolation of virtual machines by means of the microkernel.
  VMM compromise does no harm to other virtual machines as one instance
  of Karma runs exactly one virtual machine.
- Clean, tiny code base, less than 9000 source lines of code.
- Near native (guest)-Linux performance.
- Supports:
  * SMP
  * Networking
  * Direct harddisk access via AHCI
  * RTC and Hpet support


Karma is released under the terms of the Gnu General Public License
Version 2.

[0] http://karma-vmm.org
[1] http://os.int.tu-dresden.de/fiasco
[2] http://www.isti.tu-berlin.de/security_in_telecommunications
[3] http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de


-- 
Dipl.-Inf. Matthias Lange <mlange at sec.t-labs.tu-berlin.de>
Security in Telecommunications
TU Berlin / Telekom Innovation Laboratories
Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7, 10587 Berlin
Phone: +49 - 30 - 8353 58 553
Mobile: +49 - 160 - 587 28 07
Web: http://www.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/sect