[krylon]

I know next to nothing about hardware / instruction set support from the CPU side, but there are several hypervisors who are open source and thus available for study: Qemu itself, Xen, Linux KVM, FreeBSD's bhyve, OpenBSD's vmm. Oh, and there's VirtualBox.

I vaguely recall someone telling me that the qemu source code is fairly readable, but I have not looked at any of these myself, so consider it hearsay.

I don't know about the others, but the FreeBSD developers have a separate mailing list for discussion of virtualization, https://lists.freebsd.org/subscription/freebsd-virtualizatio...

[q3k]

> I vaguely recall someone telling me that the qemu source code is fairly readable [...]

That someone was either pranking you or knows a mysterious part of the qemu codebase that's unlike the rest of the criminally underdocumented qemu soup. Or my standards are too high.

[pas]

The source is okay, the problem is that there's really no docs/examples for even the basic stuff. Do you want to boot from a virtual block device and PXE from a network drive ... well, maybe these 300 command line arguments in some random order will work. Eventually. Have fun. So reading the source is a big help in that. But it's not ideal. And libvirt/oVirt/etc are helpful, but not for just that quick and dirty "let's try something out with the linux kernel in qemu" thing.

[krylon]

That person might have been sarcastic, I've been known to miss that, especially in written conversations. I also might misrember.

[tyingq]

The xhyve fork/port of bhyve for MacOS is worth mentioning: https://github.com/machyve/xhyve