Technology · Ebook

Hyperlight: Micro-VMs Without an Operating System

by Shriira Press

Hyperlight is a lightweight virtual machine manager, written in Rust and open-sourced by Microsoft as a CNCF sandbox project, that lets an application embed and safely run untrusted code behind a real hypervisor boundary. Its trick is to delete almost everything that makes VMs slow: no guest operating system, no kernel boot, no device emulation — just a slice of memory and a virtual CPU, ready in one to two milliseconds. This book builds the idea from the ground up: the speed-versus-isolation problem, the OS-free micro-VM, the host and guest crates, the no_std guest environment, typed host-guest function calls across shared memory, the hyperlight-wasm variant that runs WebAssembly behind two layers of sandboxing, and how to operate it all in practice.

Contents

1. 1Preface
2. 2Chapter 1 — The Problem Hyperlight Solves
3. 3Chapter 2 — Micro-VMs Without an OS
4. 4Chapter 3 — Architecture and Components
5. 5Chapter 4 — The Guest Environment
6. 6Chapter 5 — Host-Guest Function Calls
7. 7Chapter 6 — Hyperlight Wasm
8. 8Chapter 7 — Hyperlight in Practice