Building a virtual machine monitor in Rust

Virtual machines power a large part of the modern software engineering stack. Most cloud workloads run as virtual machines on top of a Linux-based virtual machine monitor: your API servers, your CI, and sometimes even your development environment all run as a virtual machine on someone else's hardware. But how does it work under the hood?

Thanks to the tools offered by modern CPUs, operating systems, and Rust libraries, building your own virtual machine monitor has never been easier. Starting from nothing, we'll build up your knowledge of virtualization and write our own hypervisor capable of launching Linux.

Description

Prerequisites

You will need to bring a laptop with an SSH client for the practical exercises. We will provide you with a cloud instance you can SSH into that supports nested virtualization, so you don't have to worry about compatibility with your laptop.

You should be comfortable coding in Rust, but you don't need to know about virtualization or CPU internals. We'll cover what we need from scratch.