Re: [Xen-devel] Xen on POWER

["awokd" <awokd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, March 9, 2018 11:24 am, Andre Przywara wrote:

>
> If you are serious about it, you need a team. Which is about to stay
> around! At least two people, who both know the architecture *and* Xen well.
> And it will probably take them more than a year to get something
> into a state where you can rely on it in a security sensitive environment.
> It gets even worse since you probably need more advanced
> features like hardware passthrough for Qubes OS. You can probably start
> with knowing only one (Power *or* Xen) well, and learn your way up, but I
> wouldn't dare to do an architecture port when being relatively clueless
> about details in one of them.

Acknowledged.

> Out of curiosity, which Power9 desktop hardware are you looking at for
> your Qubes OS desktop OS?

Raptor's.

> And how much better is Power in respect to vendor
> lock in (when looking at actually existing, available, capable CPUs) and
> to the Spectre/Meltdown issues?

I'm OK with vendor lock in as long as the platform remains under my
control which is no longer the case with x86. IIUC Power9 is vulnerable to
Spectre and has the same mitigations, but not Meltdown.

> Is porting Xen to Power (aside from the
> "fun challenge" aspect, which I
> would be cautious about) the right answer to you problem?

Xen on ARM might be a more reasonable starting point but I'm not sure that
would provide enough horsepower to drive a workstation and have (possibly
unfounded) concerns about the platform following in x86's footsteps with
TrustZone and end-user lock out.



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