Porting Openbsd to Xen?

Porting Openbsd to Xen?

[Nicholas Lee]

Has there been any thoughts on porting Openbsd to Xen? (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/)

Both Freebsd (unstable)
http://www.bsdclusters.com/xenofreebsd/
and Netbsd (stable)
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/faq.html#a1.3
have been ported.


The principle of Xen, having an insecure (linux) layer running as a host
OS might go against the philosophy of Openbsd. It would be nice though to
be able to use pf/altq and other Openbsd goodies in Linux land.

Nicholas

Re: Porting Openbsd to Xen?

[voices]

Nicholas Lee wrote:
> Has there been any thoughts on porting Openbsd to Xen? (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/)
> 
> Both Freebsd (unstable)
> http://www.bsdclusters.com/xenofreebsd/
> and Netbsd (stable)
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/faq.html#a1.3
> have been ported.
> 
> 
> The principle of Xen, having an insecure (linux) layer running as a host
> OS might go against the philosophy of Openbsd. It would be nice though to
> be able to use pf/altq and other Openbsd goodies in Linux land.

It would be really great, because OpenBSD has a lot of built-in security 
features, for example W^X.

I think one of the biggest problems preventing usage of Xen in some 
environments is lack of possibilities to highly secure guest systems -
for example great PaX (most important part of grsecurity).
We all know, that standard linux is totally defenceless against so 
popular buffer overflows exploitation, or format string bugs ...

-- 
voices (at) metallicrain (dot) com



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Re: Porting Openbsd to Xen?

[David Hopwood]

Nicholas Lee wrote:
[...]
> The principle of Xen, having an insecure (linux) layer running as a host
> OS might go against the philosophy of Openbsd.

Being able to run OpenBSD as a domU is a prerequisite for being able to run
it as dom0, though.

-- 
David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood@blueyonder.co.uk>



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