Questions about genode os from a prospective user (moving from Qubes)

[Norman Feske]

Hello,

thank you for your interest in Genode.

On 21.09.2018 01:49, Mr Oxide wrote:
> 1. 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.

> 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?

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.

> 3. 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.

> 4. 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_router
[2] https://genode.org/download/sculpt

Cheers
Norman

-- 
Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
Genode Labs

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