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