TPM, Haskell and RPC mapped through NOVA

[Thomas Strobel]

Hi Norman, Johannes and Nobody III,

thank you very much for your explanations, your interest and your feedback!

Also, thanks for the offer to support me with running Haskell programs
directly on Genode.

Considering the amount of work that would be needed, I think I don't
have the resources for that at the moment. I will stay with Xen as
hypervisor for now.


Out of interest, is there a way to merge Genode and Xen? Xen allows dom0
disaggregation where device drivers are packed with a server backend in
unprivileged, isolated VMs, which seems very similar to resource
multiplexers in Genode I think. QEMU is also separated into individual
VMs for each guest OS. The complexity of dom0 reduces at the same time,
so it seems as Xen would be moving towards a micro kernel approach as
well? A clear difference for me is that e.g. Genode allows a better
capability and resource management at the moment.

So in your opinion, where do you see clear differences between Genode
and the future Xen?

Would it be possible to bring the advantages of Genode over to Xen?

Would it be possible to run Xen enabled applications directly on the
Genode framework?

I'm just curious because I think that Xen has a lot of momentum in
industry at the moment, and I wonder whether Genode can benefit from that.


Best regards
Thomas


On 11/12/2014 09:43 AM, Norman Feske wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
>
> welcome to the mailing list!
>
>> I'm new to the genode mailing list, so before I start asking questions,
>> I would want to introduce myself. I'm a software developer and
>> entrepreneur and I'm looking for the right tools to build a new product.
>> It will be a cloud platform which focuses on security and privacy. Now,
>> I'm interested in whether Genode could help me with that, and so I would
>> be very thankful if you could help me with the questions I have so far.
>>
>> My first question is whether there is a resource multiplexer for a TPM
>> in Genode? Is there something equivalent to the Virtual Trusted Platform
>> Module in Xen? [1]
> No. There does not even exist an interface for TPM functionality within
> Genode yet.
>
>> My second question is how Genode can communicate with a system that is
>> running inside a NOVA hypervisor. Let's say I want to run an unmodified
>> Linux kernel on top of NOVA. Is there some kind of kernel module for
>> Linux that acts as a client/server to some server/client running
>> somewhere else in Genode? In other words, how can RPC be passed into and
>> out of the Linux user space?
> There exists no generic solution for passing RPCs between the Genode
> world and the guest OS world. Since Genode is able to run on both NOVA
> and Linux, however, it might be theoretically possible to bridge this
> gap. I think this would be an interesting research topic.
>
> The classical (and less risky) approach would be to expose the needed
> Genode functionality via a virtual device to the guest OS and install a
> driver in the guest OS kernel that provides a suitable interface to the
> guest user land.
>
>> My next question is how difficult it is to write Genode applications in
>> Haskell. Is there an environment which can run Haskell applications,
>> something similar to the Haskell Lightweight Virtual Machine for Xen? [2]
> Even though the idea to run raw Haskell programs directly on Genode is
> intriguing (it is even mentioned in our "Challenges" page [1]), we have
> not pursued any development. If you decide to move into this direction,
> I'd be glad to support you.
>
> [1] http://genode.org/about/challenges
>
>> My last question is about the GPL licensing of the Genode OS framework.
>> What licensing requirements are there for the Genode applications? Do
>> they have to be released under a GPL compatible license as well, or can
>> that be closed source components?
> The regular GPL version of Genode does not accommodate proprietary
> components. However, Genode Labs offers Genode under commercial
> licensing terms [2], which would be the way to go in your situation:
>
> [2] http://genode.org/commercial-support
>
>> I would very much appreciate to hear about your thoughts.
> Thank you for the good introduction of your plans. I am happy about your
> interest and would be delighted to support your undertaking to combine
> Haskell with Genode.
>
> Best regards
> Norman
>