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Top 13 C Virtualization Projects
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QEMU
Official QEMU mirror. Please see https://www.qemu.org/contribute/ for how to submit changes to QEMU. Pull Requests are ignored. Please only use release tarballs from the QEMU website.
Using Docker to run Tailwind in an arm64 container via QEMU emulation (proved too slow)
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unikraft
A next-generation cloud native kernel designed to unlock best-in-class performance, security primitives and efficiency savings.
Jochen Liedtke became a professor in 1999 in Karlsruhe, sadly he passed away only shortly after in 2001. I don't know if his successor Bellosa still does research on L4. There was the L4Ka project which appears to be completed. In the bachelor lecture on OS by him it's not part of the curriculum.
Rittinghaus, alumni of Bellosa, is involved with Unikraft [0], which was featured a couple of times on hn, and is using unikernel technology.
[0] https://unikraft.org/
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Going to toot my own horn here but if you're looking for something like a container with a security focus that is precisely what https://nanos.org was built for. No users, no login/ssh, no ability to run other programs other than the one that is already running. It kills off entire CWE's such as CWE-77/CWE-78 and neutralizes a large amount of nasty payloads forcing attackers to put in the work. It has all the same security features you'll find in linux (aslr, stack exec off, rodata no exec, etc.) but more.
A go unikernel deployed in this manner might have 5 files on the fs so you don't have a half-dozen interpreters or live off the land binary type stuff. Beware though that not all unikernels are built the same way and don't share the same security profiles as nanos.
At the end of the day though if security is a driving force containers are simply not built for that. Just the other day CVE-2024-45310 landed and a few weeks ago we had CVE-2024-42472 in flakpak (a continuation of the bubblewrap stuff).
People are probably going to jump in here and mention gvisor and firecracker. Note that firecracker is really a machine monitor replacement and most payloads are still running a linux guest (although nanos can work here). Gvisor does deal with the security issue well enough but at the cost of performance if you don't have access to hw virtualization.
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This seems to be about possibility to enable Vulkan in any guest OS for which virtio-gpu guest driver will be developed. For Windows https://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows/pull... is being developed, hopefully it will take off
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virtualbox-kvm
KVM Backend for VirtualBox. With our current development model, we cannot easily accept pull requests here. If you'd like to contribute, feel free to reach out to us, we are happy to find a solution.
Project mention: VMware Workstation Shifting from Proprietary Code to Using Upstream KVM | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-11-01Yep. That said, Virtualbox still has some advantages mostly not related to the actual hypervisor and more related to the UI and other emulation details, so I use this patch to use Virtualbox on top of KVM on my machine.
https://github.com/cyberus-technology/virtualbox-kvm
From my PoV, it mainly is just missing support for more networking options. It's said that it isn't tested much on AMD, but I'm using it on multiple different AMD boxen with no issues.
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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containers
Simple containers using Linux user namespaces — see also https://github.com/arachsys/ucontain (by arachsys)
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virtualbox-org-svn-vbox-trunk
*UNOFFICIAL* mirror of the repository at http://www.virtualbox.org/svn/vbox/trunk (the first 30569 commits are courtesy of https://gitorious.org/virtualbox/mainlinemirror); Please **DO NOT** open pull requests against this repo
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
C Virtualization discussion
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Includeable minimal operating system for C++
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Running Raspberry Pi OS in a Docker Container
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Minimal tips to run isolated code
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Rust in Linux Revisited
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Deterministic Replay of QEMU Emulation
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A note from our sponsor - InfluxDB
www.influxdata.com | 13 May 2025
Index
What are some of the best open-source Virtualization projects in C? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | QEMU | 11,242 |
| 2 | unikraft | 3,107 |
| 3 | nanos | 2,780 |
| 4 | kvm-guest-drivers-windows | 2,272 |
| 5 | virtualbox-kvm | 1,025 |
| 6 | SheepDog | 992 |
| 7 | cbsd | 714 |
| 8 | containers | 186 |
| 9 | qCUDA | 122 |
| 10 | virtualbox-org-svn-vbox-trunk | 90 |
| 11 | qemu-pinning | 41 |
| 12 | qemu | 24 |
| 13 | SideswipeOnQEMU | 16 |
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