Cloud Hypervisor Fifty Two arrives with CoCo VMs for AMD EPYC

The Cloud Hypervisor project, originally from Intel and now driven by Microsoft, Cyberus Tech, and Ant, has released version 52 on May 15, 2026. The main novelty is support for confidential virtual machines (CoCo VMs) on AMD EPYC processors with SEV-SNP technology, using KVM on Linux. This feature enables measured boot and functionalities similar to those already existing in Microsoft MSHV.

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Technical support for SEV-SNP in KVM 🛡️

The implementation uses the KVM hypervisor on Linux to manage the memory isolation offered by SEV-SNP. Cloud Hypervisor 52 enables VM boot measurement, verifying the integrity of the firmware and guest kernel. This translates into protection against unauthorized host access, key for workloads in multi-tenant environments. Developers have adapted the control interface to be compatible with APIs already tested in MSHV.

The umpteenth abstraction layer that saves your day 😅

Because of course, we didn't have enough virtualization layers. Now AMD, Intel, and Microsoft take turns so that system administrators have to learn a new acronym every quarter. The best part is that all of this is so that, in the end, the most serious security flaw is that someone left the password on a post-it stuck to the monitor. But hey, at least the boot is measured, even if the user is not.