rkt/rkt

stage1: investigate xhyve-based stage1

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#1030 opened on Jun 10, 2015

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Description

The xhyve hypervisor is a port of bhyve to OS X. It is built on top of Hypervisor.framework in OS X 10.10 Yosemite and higher, runs entirely in userspace, and has no other dependencies. It can run vanilla Linux distributions and may gain support for other guest operating systems in the future.

It would be interesting to explore the feasibility of creating an xhyve-based stage1, which could potentially allow rkt to run on OS X systems. This would likely be heavily derivative of the lkvm stage1.

https://github.com/mist64/xhyve http://www.pagetable.com/?p=831

Contributor guide

Tech stack
go
Domain
backendinfrastructure
Issue type
research
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
4
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-2 days
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
stale
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
clear
Prerequisites
rkt stage1 architecturehypervisor fundamentalsGo programmingOS X development environment
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
20
Research direction
Investigate the xhyve hypervisor's capabilities and compare with the existing lkvm stage1 implementation. Determine the feasibility of porting to OS X by examining xhyve's API and rkt's stage1 interface. Potential challenges include OS X kernel limitations and integration with rkt's build system. Refer to the lkvm stage1 code at https://github.com/coreos/rkt/tree/master/stage1/usr from kvm and the xhyve repository for details.