Edera architecture overview

Edera starts with a hypervisor based on Xen, with a majority of the components rebuilt in Rust for the modern cloud-native world. Edera implements the concept of zones, which are independent virtual machines running a Linux kernel and a minimal init service.

A zone is composed of a Linux kernel and a set of system extensions, each distributed as an OCI image. These aren’t heavyweight VMs—zones use paravirtualization (specifically the Xen PV protocol) to boot quickly and provide high performance.

Edera doesn’t require hardware virtualization, making it suitable for a wide range of environments. But if hardware virtualization is available, it’s used to match bare-metal performance. Otherwise, a minor performance tradeoff yields strong isolation that outpaces traditional container security boundaries.