Oxide's RFD 26 details why it picked bhyve and illumos over KVM and Xen
Sethwinterroth · x · 2026-09-03
Oxide Computer pointed a questioner to its public RFD 26, which documents the host OS and hypervisor selection for servers in the Oxide Rack. Authored by Joshua M. Clulow, Patrick Mooney, and Robert Mustacchi, it was also discussed on the Oxide and Friends "Helios" podcast episode.
Key points:
- Only two candidates: KVM on GNU/Linux and bhyve on illumos
- Rejections: Xen's large/complicated dom0 codebase (discarded by Amazon), VirtualBox's unpalatable C++ codebase, unproven emerging VMMs like OpenBSD's vmm
- Server CPUs are a "cornucopia" versus constrained components like the Service Processor and Root of Trust, enabling Rust, rich postmortem debugging, and live tracing
- Design splits kernel VMM duties (privileged VM state, nested paging) from userspace (device emulation, live migration)
A primary source for understanding why Oxide built its own Helios OS.
More from Infra
- PyTorch MPS Linear Algebra Called 'Trash': Slow and Improperly Batched — ducha_aiki · 2026-09-03
- Anthropic Signs $35 Billion Cloud Deal With Lambda to Scale Claude — The Decoder · 2026-09-03
- Hot Chips 2026: Full Conference Analysis of GPUs, Memory and Custom Accelerators — AccBalanced · 2026-09-03
- Neoclouds' Real Moat Is Financing: Lock Power First, Then Customers, Then Buy GPUs — AccBalanced · 2026-09-03
- How Researchers Reached Thousands of Data Centers in Minutes via a 20-Year-Old IPMI Flaw — AccBalanced · 2026-09-03
- On-device LLM inference on Android with QNN, ExecuTorch, LiteRT and Gemma showcased at EdgeAI event — carrycooldude · 2026-09-03