The Multikernel Linux project has released its first public kernel tree. Based on Linux 7.0 (labeled v7.0-mk2), it makes it possible to run several independent Linux kernels simultaneously on a single physical machine.
No hypervisor, real kernels
One Linux instance acts as the host and manages a pool of CPUs, memory and PCI devices. These resources can be split into groups, each starting its own kernel. Unlike virtual machines, there is no hypervisor in between – each kernel gets dedicated CPU cores and accesses the hardware directly.
Still early days
For now, only x86_64 is officially supported. According to the project, early benchmarks show promising performance. For server and edge scenarios, the approach could become a resource-efficient alternative to classic virtualization – with less overhead, since the hypervisor layer is removed.
