[ANNOUNCE] NOVA Microhypervisor 0.1 prerelease

"Udo A. Steinberg" <[email protected]> Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:04:12 +0100
Newsgroups gmane.comp.micro-kernel.l4.devel,gmane.os.hurd.l4
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi,

The NOVA project is happy to announce that there is a prerelease of the
NOVA microhypervisor available for download at http://www.hypervisor.org/
or http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~us15/nova/ under the terms of the
GNU Public License version 2.

NOVA is based on a modern microhypervisor written in C++ and assembler.
It currently supports x86-32 SMP platforms with hardware virtualization
features, such as Intel VT-x or AMD-V, and facilitates running multiple
unmodified guest operating systems in virtual machines with near-native
performance. On machines without VT-x or AMD-V, the functionality is
reduced to that of a microkernel.

Like third-generation microkernels, the NOVA microhypervisor uses a
capability-based authorization model and provides only basic mechanisms for
spatial and temporal isolation, scheduling, communication and delegation of
platform resources. Additional services are provided by an unprivileged
multi-server user environment running on top of the microhypervisor.

In NOVA, we implemented almost all of the virtualization functionality in a
deprivileged user-level virtual-machine monitor. This design choice improves
the overall security of the system, because exploitation of a bug in the
platform virtualization code only compromises the VMM and leaves the
remaining components unaffected.

Cheers,

	- Udo

_______________________________________________
l4-hackers mailing list
[email protected]
http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/mailman/listinfo/l4-hackers
signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 197 B)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAksyMWwACgkQnhRzXSM7nSn6dwCeN79gRsRJJubyaf3B/IV+jY2n
Y5IAni5fUnI0wj5WpyHDb1rW2WOYO0TE
=Lj40
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----