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Top 6 Rust KVM Projects
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kata-containers
Kata Containers is an open source project and community working to build a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that feel and perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs. https://katacontainers.io/
Project mention: Kubelet Metrics: How cAdvisor and CRI Collect Kubernetes Stats | dev.to | 2026-05-20container-stats exporter to the Kata Containers
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cloud-hypervisor
A Virtual Machine Monitor for modern Cloud workloads. Features include CPU, memory and device hotplug, support for running Windows and Linux guests, device offload with vhost-user and a minimal compact footprint. Written in Rust with a strong focus on security.
Project mention: Launch HN: Freestyle: Sandboxes for AI Coding Agents | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-06https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor
Freestyle/other providers will likely provide better debugging experience but thats something you can probably get past for a lot of workloads.
The time when you/anyone should think about Freestyle/anyone is when the load spikes/the need to create hundreds of VMs in short spikes shows up, or when you're looking for some of the more complex feature sets any given provider has built out (forks, GPUs, network boundaries, etc).
I also highly recommend self hosting anything you do outside of your normal VPC. Sandboxes are the biggest possible attack surface and it is a feature of us that we're not in your cloud; If we mess up security your app is still fine.
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Project mention: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-17
Could it be made even faster using some of the ideas from https://github.com/zerobootdev/zeroboot ?
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Project mention: Why Your SFTP Transfer Is Stuck at 2 MB/s (and the Fix Is a Protocol from 1983) | dev.to | 2026-03-29
cubic is a CLI tool for creating and managing lightweight virtual machines on Linux and macOS. Think of it as the middle ground between running Docker containers and spinning up full VMs in libvirt. You run cubic create myvm --image debian and get a cloud-init provisioned VM with SSH access, a dedicated disk, and port forwarding. cubic ssh myvm drops you into a shell. cubic scp file.tar.gz myvm:~/ copies files in. It's about 7,000 lines of Rust, built on QEMU/KVM with cloud-init for provisioning.
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).
Rust KVM discussion
Rust KVM related posts
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Linux Page Faults, MMAP, and userfaultfd
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Microsandbox: Virtual Machines that feel and perform like containers
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Using Kata Containers as a Container Runtime in OpenStack Zun
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Kata Containers: Lightweight VMs for Containers
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Kubernetes on Hybrid Cloud: Bare-metal or Hypervisor
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Fly Kubernetes
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Method to block possible internet traffic from LLaMA on MacOS
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 9 Jun 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source KVM projects in Rust? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | kata-containers | 8,017 |
| 2 | cloud-hypervisor | 5,732 |
| 3 | zeroboot | 2,356 |
| 4 | obliteration | 794 |
| 5 | rkvm | 527 |
| 6 | cubic | 44 |
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