uhyve is small hypervisor to boot the Hermit kernel, which is a unikernel operating system targeting a scalable and predictable runtime behavior for HPC and cloud environments.
Warning: At the moment uhyve grants full host file system access from within the unikernel with the permissions of the user running uhyve. Thus, it should not be used for applications which require isolation from the host system.
An installation of the Rust toolchain is required. Please visit the Rust website and follow the installation instructions.
Install uhyve with
$ cargo install --locked uhyve
To check if your system supports virtualization, you can use the following command:
if egrep -c '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo > /dev/null; then echo "Virtualization support found"; fi
On Linux, uhyve depends on the virtualization solution KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine). If the following command gives you some output, you are ready to go!
lsmod | grep kvm
NOTE: If in case the above steps don't work, make sure to check in your BIOS settings that virtualization is enabled there.
Disclaimer: Currently, uhyve is mainly developed for Linux. The macOS version has not been tested extensively and does not support all features of the Linux version.
Apple's Command Line Tools must be installed. The following terminal command installs these tools without Apple's IDE Xcode:
xcode-select --install
Additionally, the included hypervisor bases on the Hypervisor Framework depending on OS X Yosemite (10.10) or newer. To verify if your processor is able to support this framework, run the following in your Terminal:
sysctl kern.hv_support
The output kern.hv_support: 1
indicates virtualization support.
Starting with Big Sur, all processes using the Hypervisor API must have the com.apple.security.hypervisor entitlement and therefore must be signed.
To build from source, simply checkout the code and use cargo build
.
git clone https://github.com/hermitcore/uhyve.git
cd uhyve
cargo build --release
uhyve
can be self-signed with the following command.
codesign -s - --entitlements app.entitlements --force path_to_uhyve/uhyve
The file app.entitlements
must have following content:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>com.apple.security.hypervisor</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>
For further details have a look at Apple's documentation.
Use the hypervisor to start the unikernel.
uhyve /path/to/the/unikernel/binary
uhyve can be configured via environment variables. The following variables are supported.
HERMIT_CPUS
: specifies the number of cores the virtual machine may use.HERMIT_MEM
: defines the memory size of the virtual machine. The suffixes M and G can be used to specify a value in megabytes or gigabytes, respectively.HERMIT_VERBOSE
to 1
makes the hypervisor print kernel log messages to the terminal.HERMIT_GDB_PORT=port
activate a gdb server for the application running inside uhyve. See belowBy default, the loader initializes a system with one core and 512 MiB RAM.
Example: the following command starts the demo application in a virtual machine, which has 4 cores and 8GiB memory:
HERMIT_CPUS=4 HERMIT_MEM=8G uhyve /path/to/the/unikernel/binary
Basic support of (single-core) applications is already integrated into uhyve.
By specifying variable HERMIT_GDB_PORT=port
, uhyve is working as gdbserver and is waiting on port port
for a connection to a gdb.
For instance, with the following command uhyve is waiting on port 6677
for a connection.
HERMIT_GDB_PORT=6677 uhyve /path_to_the_unikernel/hello_world
In principle, every gdb-capable IDE should be able to debug Hermit applications. (Eclipse, VSCode, ...)
The repository hermit-rs provides example configuration files to debug a Hermit application with Visual Code.
Network support is currently unstable and tested only on Linux.
If you require uhyve to create its own virtual ethernet interface, you will need to provide it with the CAP_NET_ADMIN
capability:
# as root
setcap cap_net_admin+ep /path/to/uhyve # ./target/debug/uhyve
You can set the pre-created tap device name via an environment variable TAP
Currently, the device is hard-coded with the name tap10
. You will need to create the device and connect it to a bridge (such as virbr0):
ip tuntap add tap10 mode tap user "$(whoami)"
ip link set tap10 master virbr0
ip link set dev tap10 up
And, if desired, set the IP address and gateway of your RustyHermit instance via HERMIT_IP
and HERMIT_GATEWAY
.
Licensed under either of
at your option.
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.