# Cloud Hypervisor

> Rust virtual machine monitor for KVM and MSHV

**Category:** DevOps  
**Pricing:** open-source  
**URL:** https://www.cloudhypervisor.org  
**GitHub:** https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor  
**Added:** 2026-10-17

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## The Hook

Cloud Hypervisor is a small virtual machine monitor written in Rust that runs modern Linux and Windows guests on top of KVM or the Microsoft Hypervisor (MSHV), with minimal emulation and paravirtualised virtio devices instead of legacy hardware.

## What's Good

Release v54.0 (2026-10-14), built on the shared rust-vmm crates. It supports CPU, memory and device hotplug, vhost-user device offload, direct kernel boot or UEFI firmware boot, and an HTTP API for controlling VMs. Static binaries ship for x86-64 and AArch64, and 64-bit Linux plus Windows 10 / Windows Server 2019 guests are supported. ★~6.4k.

## The Catch

License note: GitHub detects no license for this repo, because there is no single LICENSE file. Licensing is declared per file: the code is Apache-2.0, some files are Apache-2.0 AND BSD-3-Clause, and the docs and markdown are CC-BY-4.0 — the texts are in the LICENSES/ folder. Check that this fits your compliance process before you ship it. It is also low-level: there is no VM manager or UI, so you create and script VMs yourself through the CLI or API. Main support is x86-64 and AArch64; riscv64 is experimental with limited features.

## Verdict

A lean, modern VMM to build a VM platform or sandbox on — not a replacement for a VM manager.