Re: [MirageOS-devel] vchan/xenstore in Qubes r3

[Thomas Leonard <talex5@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 21 June 2014 08:58, Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> A very interesting article from Joanna on the new r3 alpha of QubesOS.
>
> http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.in/2013/06/qubes-os-r3-alpha-preview-odyssey-hal.html
>
> - Qubes uses upstream Xen vchan now, which means that we "should" 
> interoperate with the ocaml-vchan library.
>
> - They've replaced Xenstore with a simpler transport that removes permissions 
> and uses vchan under the hood.  This is also something that should be easier 
> to do with Dave's oxenstore+irmin, since many of the components such as 
> xenstore_transport are functorized, and of Irmin can serialize to several 
> formats including Git, for reconciliation with external databases.
>
> - Qubes looks like an excellent candidate for a 'unikernel' desktop OS!  I'm 
> going to try it when I hunt down a PC laptop, but if anyone else gets a 
> chance I'd be interested in hearing about it.

I haven't tried the new alpha, but I tried the previous version of
Qubes on my new laptop when it first arrived (actually, being able to
try Qubes was one of the reasons I wanted a laptop with Intel
graphics).

It's clever, but it seemed rather slow and quite buggy. Even the
installer failed and needed some manual work before I could boot the
new system. I had hoped to use it as an easy way to run applications
on multiple OSs together on a single display, but it turned out they
only really support Fedora for now.

One interesting thing for Mirage: they have a separate domain (NetVM)
for network drivers, and another for the firewall (FirewallVM):

http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/QubesFirewall

FirewallVM is a complete Linux system and requires several hundred MB,
as shown in this screenshot:

http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/attachment/wiki/QubesScreenshots/r2b2-software-update.png

[ aside: I don't know under what UI theory it's considered a good idea
to fade out the bars on bar graphs, but anyway ]

I imagine a Mirage unikernel would be a perfect replacement for their
FirewallVM.

In the end, I only tried it for a few hours before wiping it and
installing Arch instead. Some other problems were that there is no
tiling window manager available, and you can't run VirtualBox on Xen.
Qubes doesn't offer graphics acceleration for guests (due to the focus
on security), which would probably mess up gotomeeting.


-- 
Dr Thomas Leonard        http://0install.net/
GPG: 9242 9807 C985 3C07 44A6  8B9A AE07 8280 59A5 3CC1
GPG: DA98 25AE CAD0 8975 7CDA  BD8E 0713 3F96 CA74 D8BA

_______________________________________________
MirageOS-devel mailing list
MirageOS-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xenproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mirageos-devel