FAQ Friday

And in fact, when we started the company, we had an advisor to the company say, "Hey, you got to be sure you can run VMware ESX on your rack." I said, "Bad news, it’s not going to run VMware ESX. We’re going to do our own hypervisor."

Why would we not use open source options like KVM? Well, in part because KVM involves QEMU. And if you know anything about QEMU, the implementation there, we actually envisioned a much more robust implementation that we could do ourselves. One that was designed around robustness, but also the ability to migrate VMs.

We did that. That machine model is called Propolis. It’s based on bhyve, which itself is based on the very powerful primitives the microprocessor offers us for virtualization.

That machine model, that user-level machine model, is all in Rust (of course, it’s Oxide). And it’s all open source, so you can go check it out for yourself.

But we deployed KVM in production. We had deployed QEMU in previous lives. We knew what that was like, and we knew we could get to a better place with our own hypervisor at Oxide.

Thanks, and see you next time.