I am a former qubes user. Currently on Linux MInt. Thinking of moving to Genode.
Questions are (and this is for the Nova kernel with VirtualBox):
1. Can you assign PCI device hardware to virtual machines?
2. Can VMs be networked to each other? My idea with qubes was to setup an HVM with a dedicated HBA card and then install freenas within it. I would then use this as a nas for all of my vms to share. Is this possible with genode?
3. Is there anything that is not compatible (compared to qubes os)?
4. How is net security in dom0? In qubes os there is no dom0 networking.
Hello,
thank you for your interest in Genode.
On 21.09.2018 01:49, Mr Oxide wrote:
- Can you assign PCI device hardware to virtual machines?
We solely use virtual machines as runtimes for software, not as device-driver providers. PCI devices are driven by separate driver components, usually there is one component per PCI device.
- Can VMs be networked to each other? My idea with qubes was to setup an
HVM with a dedicated HBA card and then install freenas within it. I would then use this as a nas for all of my vms to share. Is this possible with genode?
There exists the NIC router component [1], which allows one to define routing rules between several network-using components, i.e., multiple VMs. Alternatively, you may also consider using VirtualBox' shared folders are a transport mechanism for shared storage between VMs.
- Is there anything that is not compatible (compared to qubes os)?
I'm not sure I understand this question correctly.
Software-wise, VirtualBox on top of Genode supports the same guest OSes as VirtualBox running on other host systems.
Native applications usually require some porting effort to run them on Genode.
Hardware-wise, the supported PC platforms are somehow limited by the drivers available for Genode. As a rule of thumb, recent Intel-based PC platforms are supported quite well. However, certain features like suspend/resume do not exist on Genode yet.
- How is net security in dom0? In qubes os there is no dom0 networking.
There is no dom0 in Genode. Instead, the system is composed of many components with each having a distinct role and confined access to the resources it has to interact with. To illustrate this point, right after booting Sculpt OS [2], there are about 50 components running, each sandboxed individually.
[1] https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/tree/master/repos/os/src/server/nic_rou... [2] https://genode.org/download/sculpt
Cheers Norman