FEATURE: add paravirtualized clock support for guest time access #1173
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Hyperlight guests can now read time without expensive VM exits by using a paravirtualized clock shared between host and guest. This enables high-frequency timing operations like benchmarking, rate limiting, and timestamping with minimal overhead.
Paravirtualized clocks work by having the hypervisor populate a shared memory page with clock calibration data. The guest reads this data along with the CPU's TSC to compute the current time entirely in userspace, avoiding the cost of a VM exit.
Reference: https://docs.kernel.org/virt/kvm/x86/msr.html#pvclock
The implementation uses the native mechanism for each hypervisor:
Guests have access to:
Rust API (hyperlight_guest_bin::time):
C API (hyperlight_guest_capi):
The feature is gated behind
guest_time(enabled by default) and documented in docs/guest-time.md.Note: The timezone offset is a snapshot from sandbox creation and does not update for DST transitions during the sandbox lifetime.