Ways we harden our KVM hypervisor at Google Cloud: Security in plaintext
> Non-QEMU implementation: Google does not use QEMU, the user-space virtual machine monitor and hardware emulation. Instead, we wrote our own user-space virtual machine monitor that has the following security advantages over QEMU: Simple host and guest architecture support matrix. QEMU supports a large matrix of host and guest architectures, along with different modes and devices that significantly increase complexity.<p>I've noticed that a lot of projects that <i>do</i> support multiple architectures, particularly obscure ones, tend to find oddball edge cases more easily than those that don't. For example, not assuming the endianness of the CPU arch forces you to get network code to cooperate well.<p>> Because we support a single architecture and a relatively small number of devices, our emulator is much simpler.<p>No doubt it's simpler than QEMU but I wonder if adding tests to QEMU, even if they're only for the specific architectures they're running (most likely x86-64) would have been just as usable.<p>Then again when you're Google and have the resources to build a VM runtime from the ground up it's easier to convince management that "<i>This is the right decision!</i>".