No QEMU overhead. No libvirt abstraction layer. Direct access to
/dev/kvm via cloud-hypervisor, managed by a
web-based control plane you actually own.
SmechVisor is a stripped-down fork of SmechOS built for one job:
running virtual machines on bare metal with zero bloat in the stack.
It boots directly into OpenRC, starts the smechvisord
control plane daemon, and exposes a web dashboard for managing KVM
execution pipelines. No desktop environment. No package manager UI.
No unnecessary services in the way.
SmechVisor interfaces with /dev/kvm using
cloud-hypervisor -- a modern Rust VMM that bypasses QEMU's
device emulation layer entirely. Fewer moving parts means fewer
things to break, patch, and trust.
Hardware-accelerated display for VMs via a decoupled
vhost-user-gpu daemon bound to a Unix socket.
VirtIO device ID 16 -- the GPU is handled out-of-process,
isolated from the VMM itself.
A dark industrial dashboard served by smechvisord
on port 8080. Node resource overview, VM provisioning, IOMMU
telemetry, and PCIe passthrough (VFIO) toggle -- all from a
browser, no SSH required for day-to-day management.
The VFIO toggle in the control plane checks
/sys/kernel/iommu_groups, /proc/cpuinfo
(VT-x / AMD-V), and the kernel cmdline before allowing
passthrough to be enabled. If IOMMU isn't active, it blocks the
toggle and offers to reboot directly into UEFI firmware settings.
SmechVisor runs a minimal OpenRC init stack. The default
runlevel starts vhost-user-gpu then
smechvisord and nothing else. No journal daemon,
no socket activation, no unit file sprawl.
The underlying SmechOS base targets an independent musl + Clang
userland -- no glibc dependency chain, no GNU toolchain
requirement at runtime. Built from source via SmechDeploy's
smechvisor profile.
Every major hypervisor platform today sits behind abstraction layers, proprietary management interfaces, or license walls that put the operator one policy change away from losing access to their own hardware. SmechVisor exists to remove that dependency. The control plane is open source, the init system is OpenRC, the VMM is cloud-hypervisor -- every layer is auditable and replaceable.
SmechVisor is built by the same pipeline that builds SmechOS --
SmechDeploy's smechvisor profile runs the musl
bootstrap, compiles the kernel with KVM and VFIO modules,
installs the OpenRC skeleton, drops in smechvisord
and cloud-hypervisor, and produces a bootable ISO. No pre-built
base images, no Dockerfile layer cache, no mystery in the build
chain.
SmechVisor is in early alpha. The control plane daemon builds and runs. The dashboard UI is functional. The ISO build pipeline is integrated into SmechDeploy. Real hardware ISO testing is the next milestone.
SmechVisor is open source under Smech Labs. Hardware compatibility reports, bug reports, and contributions are tracked in the SmechOS issue tracker.
