The vm-virtio workspace provides virtio abstractions and implementation for the virtio queue and devices. For now, it consists of the following crates:

• virtio-bindings -> provides Rust FFI bindings to the corresponding Linux kernel API;
• virtio-blk -> contains abstractions for parsing and executing a request of the block device;
• virtio-console -> contains abstractions for the virtio console device;
• virtio-device -> provides abstractions for the common functionality of the virtio devices, and a default implementation for the MMIO transport operations (read, write);
• virtio-queue -> provides a virtio device implementation for a virtio queue, a virtio descriptor and a chain of such descriptors;
• virtio-queue-ser -> provides abstractions for serialization and deserialization for virtio queue states;
• virtio-vsock -> provides an implementation for the vsock packet.

We offer support only for virtio v1.0+ (the legacy interface is not supported).

The queues are the mechanism for data transport between the virtio device and the guest driver. Each device can have zero or more virtqueues, for example the block device has one queue, the vsock device has three queues etc. The communication between the driver and device is possible through different transport options, i.e. PCI, MMIO, and Channel I/O buses. In addition to the queue and device emulation that is provided in vm-virtio, the VMM has to also define the device backend and the event handling mechanism.

For details about the abstractions provided in virtio-queue, check its separate README.

Virtio device implementations will implement the VirtioDevice trait. Typically, the VMM will implement virtio devices and provide the paravirtualized IO emulation for all supported virtio devices. For example, a VMM willing to emulate a virtio networking device will implement the VirtioDevice trait.

The VirtioDevice implementation will be discovered by the guest through a virtio transport layer (MMIO, PCI or Channel I/O). The transport layer implementation will then call into the VirtioDevice's activate method to notify the device that the guest driver is done configuring it and that it should be ready to handle IO from the guest. On the other hand, the VirtioDevice's reset method will be called by the transport layer when the guest driver needs to reset and release all the emulated device resources.

Our Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline is implemented on top of Buildkite. For the complete list of tests, check our CI pipeline.

Each individual test runs in a container. To run the tests locally, you can use the dev-container on both x86 and arm64.

cd ~/vm-virtio
container_version=15
docker run -it \
           --security-opt seccomp=unconfined \
           --volume $(pwd):/vm-virtio \
           --volume ~/.ssh:/root/.ssh \
           rustvmm/dev:v${container_version}
cd vm-virtio
./rust-vmm-ci/test_run.py

The vm-virtio workspace is tested with unit tests (including documentation examples). For running all the tests, use the following command:

cargo test --all-features

--all-features is used in order to also include the tests under a feature, such as backend-stdio.

For details about the testing in the virtio-queue crate, check its separate documentation.

We run 15 minutes long fuzzing sessions for each PR and on merges to the main branch. For more details about the fuzz targets and implementation, check the Fuzzing Readme.

For changes that could introduce security vulnerabilities, we recommend running the "fuzzing-vm-virtio" Buildkite pipeline that runs fuzzing for 1 day instead of 15 minutes. This pipeline is optional which means that PRs can be merged without waiting for the fuzzing sessions to finish. As running fuzzing for 1 day keeps the Builkite agents busy and could cause delays in merging other PRs, this longer fuzzing sessions are not run by default on all PRs. To enable the run, one of the Buildkite administrators need to unblock the pipeline by following the Buildkite run link in the PR and click on the corresponding unblock pipeline button.

This project is licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0
• BSD-3-Clause License