XCP-ng is a Xen Project incubation project sponsored by the Linux Foundation. Recently, its team posted a blog saying that it will introduce Rust into the Xen project and use Rust to rewrite some Xen components.

Xen is an x86 open source virtual machine monitor (VMM) developed by the University of Cambridge that supports high-performance virtualization of multiple operating systems on a single machine.

The overall platform of the XCP project consists of many different programs: Xen (hypervisor), XAPI (API/tools stack), SMAPI (storage stack) and guest tools among other components. They are a mix of languages ​​such as C, Python, OCaml and even Go, and some components somehow become very old and not easy to maintain.

As for the choice of Rust, the team also gave corresponding explanations. First, Rust brings performance and memory safety at the same time, which is very good for a virtualization platform like XCP-ng. Second, Rutst does not have a garbage collector and a borrow checker and other extra features… Most importantly, Rust can be used indifferent levels of scenesIt can not only replace Go and Python to write the application layer, but also replace the C language to write the underlying logic.

Of course, you can’t become fat if you eat one bite,XCP-ng teamDefinitely not using Rust all at once Rewriting the entire Xen hypervisor, the goal now is to start replacing some of the smaller components, so that the project’s programming language is relatively uniform. The current plan is to rewrite two components in Rust: the Linux guest tools (currently in Go) and the metrics daemon (currently in OCaml).

Interested parties can learn more details on the XCP-ng blog.