hyperlight-dev/hyperlight

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

4635 stars · 200 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Hyperlight is a lightweight Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) library, written in Rust, that embeds micro virtual machines into applications for safely executing untrusted code. It provides hardware-isolated micro VMs with no guest OS that start in milliseconds and support typed host-guest function calls with microsecond latency.

Use cases

• run untrusted code in a hardware-isolated sandbox from my Rust application
• execute guest functions in micro VMs with millisecond startup
• isolate plugin or extension code with hypervisor-level security
• call functions across a VM boundary as if they were local functions
• run no_std Rust or C guest binaries without a guest OS
• snapshot and restore VM state between function calls

When to choose

• you need strong hardware isolation for untrusted or third-party code with minimal latency
• you want micro VMs without the overhead of booting a guest kernel or OS
• you are building in Rust on Linux (KVM/MSHV) or Windows (WHP/WSL2)
• you need a small, explicit host-guest interface with zero implicit syscalls

When to avoid

• you need to run existing unmodified Linux binaries or containers that require a full guest OS
• you need macOS support (Hypervisor.Framework is not yet available) or arm64 (still upcoming)
• you need a stable API - Hyperlight is pre-1.0 and may change between releases
• you need general-purpose VM management like Firecracker or full system virtualization

Facets

library · maturity active

security rpc developer-tools security developer-tools cloud-computing infrastructure-as-code windows rust cross-platform micro-vms vmm hypervisor hardware-isolation untrusted-code-execution kvm mshv whp no-std cncf sandboxing virtualization linux

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="hyperlight-dev/hyperlight")