Cloud Hypervisor 53.0 is now available for this open-source, Rust-based VMM focused on cloud workloads and modern security needs. Originally started at Intel, Cloud Hypervisor continues seeing new development these days by Microsoft, Meta, Arm, and other organizations.

With Cloud Hypervisor 53.0, it seems Meta is now making heavier use -- or planning to -- of Cloud Hypervisor. In prior Cloud Hypervisor releases there would typically be one or none contributors from Meta but now in Cloud Hypervisor 53.0 there is one contributor from @fb.com and another five @meta.com contributors. So something definitely seems to be brewing now at Meta around Cloud Hypervisor with seeing a definite uptick in open-source contributions to the project.

On the code side, the shiny new feature of Cloud Hypervisor 53 is the introduction of an offloaded snapshot/restore daemon. This new daemon allows for the snapshot and restore handling to be carried out by an external process. This offload daemon is at parity to Cloud Hypervisor's internal snapshot/restore implementation. Meta engineers were involved in the development of this daemon.

Cloud Hypervisor 53 also now supports live migration data encryption using mutual TLS, VFIO migration v2 is now supported for same-host snapshot/restore, and other migration and snapshot/restore improvements.

The new Cloud Hypervisor release also adds Windows guest support for nested Hyper-V as used by WSL2 on the KVM back-end. There is also virtio-rtc device support, new command line and API options, and various bug fixes.

Downloads and more details on Cloud Hypervisor 53.0 via GitHub and CloudHypervisor.org .