- It puts Mirage in use in real production systems.
- It strengthens the ecosystem around Hypervisor.framework. After xhyve and Veertu, this is really nice. So much for the meme that newer OS X versions only integrate iOS features.
Open sourcing our libraries is obviously just the start. We're really keen to hear about any other uses that people might have and move HyperKit in the direction of easy integration with higher-level frameworks.
For instance, direct ports of unikernel projects to run against the HyperKit kexec APIs would be really fun. Any takers for MirageOS or HalVM? :-)
We're taking it in a fairly different direction from upstream xhyve and bhyve, with the integration with other kits like VPNKit, DataKit (and soon, FSKit). We wanted to be able to diverge the build system in particular, and this makes it difficult to maintain a direct fork.
However, we're committed to upstreaming patches to their relevant projects where relevant, and so the HyperKit Git repository is as close as we can make it. If it diverges a lot in the future with file renames, we'll have to figure out the Git-fu to make cherry-picks easier...