Hypervisors¶
Introduction¶
Kata Containers supports multiple hypervisors. This document provides a very high level overview of the available hypervisors, giving suggestions as to which hypervisors you may wish to investigate further.
Note:
This document is not prescriptive or authoritative:
- It is up to you to decide which hypervisors may be most appropriate for your use-case.
- Refer to the official documentation for each hypervisor for further details.
Types¶
| Hypervisor | Written in | Architectures | GPU Support | Intel TDX | AMD SEV-SNP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud Hypervisor | rust | aarch64, x86_64 |
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| Firecracker | rust | aarch64, x86_64 |
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| QEMU | C | all |  |
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| Dragonball | rust | aarch64, x86_64 |
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| StratoVirt | rust | aarch64, x86_64 |
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Each Kata runtime is configured for a specific hypervisor through the runtime's configuration file. For example:
[hypervisor.qemu]
path = "/opt/kata/bin/qemu-system-x86_64"
[hypervisor.clh]
path = "/opt/kata/bin/cloud-hypervisor"
Cloud Hypervisor¶
Cloud Hypervisor is a more modern hypervisor written in Rust.
Firecracker¶
Firecracker is a minimal and lightweight hypervisor created for the AWS Lambda product.
QEMU¶
QEMU is the best supported hypervisor for NVIDIA-based GPUs and for confidential computing use-cases (such as Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP). Runtimes that use this are normally named kata-qemu-nvidia-gpu-*. The Kata project focuses primarily on QEMU runtimes for GPU support.
Dragonball¶
Dragonball is a special hypervisor created by the Ant Group that runs in the same process as the Rust-based containerd shim.