Re: [MirageOS-devel] Xen vs Qubes target

[Thomas Leonard <talex5@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 22 Mar 2020 at 18:28, Hannes Mehnert <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm still struggling why there is a separate `-t qubes` target from the
> `-t xen`, and furthermore why qubes-mirage-firewall etc. use `-t xen`
> (and not `-t qubes`). From my understanding, the main difference in the
> mirage tool is the default IP configuration, which uses
> Qubes_ipv4.Make(..) for the qubes target, and Static_ipv4.Make(..) for
> the Xen target.

As I recall, `-t qubes` was designed so that unikernels that don't
know anything about Qubes can run there. e.g. it automatically started
dummy versions of services (e.g. qrexec, qubesdb, gui) that were
required. Unikernels that make use of Qubes features specifically use
`-t xen` so they can start these services manually and have full
control over them.

However, it may be less useful than it used to be, as Qubes no longer
requires dummy services to be provided (see `man qvm-features`), and
it would probably be better simply to disable any defaults that the
unikernel overrides (maybe mirage already does this; I don't
remember).

> I'm asking since I intended to work on "use /qubes-random-seed from
> QubesDB to seed the RNG", but I'm not sure how the logic should be to
> decide whether to use this or not, I initially thought "if the target is
> Qubes", but given the above, it may be more suitable to read this value
> "if qubesdb is used and as well the random number generator" -- but
> unfortunately I don't know how such a logic could be embedded in functoria.
>
> Any ideas / pointers?



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talex5 (GitHub/Twitter)        http://roscidus.com/blog/
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