What is hyper?

HyperContainer lets you run Docker containers inside a lightweight virtual machine, giving you the portability and small size of containers with the strong security isolation of a VM. The repository provides two tools: a background service called hyperd and a command-line tool called hyperctl for interacting with it. Regular containers share the host's operating system kernel, which is fast and lightweight but can be a security risk. Full virtual machines are very secure but slow to start and take up a lot of disk space. HyperContainer splits the difference: it wraps a container image in its own minimal kernel, so each container gets hardware-level isolation. The result is something that boots in under a second, takes up only megabytes of space, and keeps workloads strongly separated from each other. This is useful for teams running multi-tenant cloud platforms or shared infrastructure where neighbors need real isolation. For example, a hosting provider serving many customers from the same physical servers can use this to give each customer a strongly isolated environment without the overhead of spinning up full VMs for everyone. It also appeals to organizations that already have virtualization infrastructure and want to adopt container-style workflows without throwing away their existing tooling. The project is notable for being hypervisor-agnostic, meaning it works with multiple virtualization technologies like QEMU and Xen rather than locking you into one. It runs on Linux and requires QEMU 2.0 or later. The README doesn't go into much detail on configuration beyond noting that a config file and specific kernel files are needed to get the daemon running.