Alternatives to crosvm
A hosted virtual machine monitor written in Rust that runs guest operating systems inside sandboxed virtual devices. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
crosvm
A hosted virtual machine monitor written in Rust that runs guest operating systems inside sandboxed virtual devices.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as crosvm.
Cloud Hypervisor
An open source virtual machine monitor written in Rust for running modern cloud workloads on KVM.
Cloud Hypervisor is also a Rust VMM on KVM, adding a REST API, live migration and device passthrough, and it is supported by Kata Containers.
Firecracker
Run isolated workloads inside lightweight Linux microVMs.
Firecracker focuses on lightweight microVMs for container and function-based server infrastructure under the Apache-2.0 license, and it still requires low-level configuration.
QEMU
The machine emulator and virtualiser that most of the Linux virtualisation stack is built on.
QEMU provides broad machine emulation across architectures and underpins most Linux virtualization tools, but raw QEMU has a large and unfriendly command line option surface.
krunvm
A command-line tool that creates lightweight microVMs from OCI container images using libkrun.
krunvm builds microVMs straight from OCI container images with volume mapping and port exposure, runs on Linux and macOS, and depends on libkrun and buildah.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
KVM
The Linux kernel's built-in hypervisor for hardware-accelerated virtual machines.
Kata Containers
An open-source container runtime that runs each container inside a lightweight virtual machine for stronger isolation.
libvirt
A toolkit, daemon and API for managing KVM, QEMU, Xen, LXC and other virtualization platforms.
