During the August 13th Architecture Committee member, we decided that it makes sense to announce and plan for deprecation of the NEMU VMM for the Kata Containers project.

 

I was very excited about the improvements in the NEMU project, as it aligned very well with Kata’s desire to provide lightweight and fast virtual machines.  Fortunately, many of the end-user benefits of NEMU are making their way or are already available in QEMU 4.1, and the team behind NEMU is focusing on advancements around rust-vmm. We will still include NEMU as part of our static release in 1.9, but we do not recommend using NEMU in production.

 

Our initial offering of virtio-fs was based on patches on top of the NEMU hypervisor. Going forward, while we wait for virtio-fs to hit upstream (crossing fingers for QEMU 4.2), we will create QEMU artifacts and a Kata configuration which tracks the virtio-fs QEMU branch.

 

If you have any concerns based on the information above, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

 

Thanks,

Eric