Qubes OS running under Hyper-V

[grzegorz....@gmail.com]

With the release of Qubes 3.0 hypervisor abstraction layer was introduced, theoretically allowing Qubes to run under any hypervisor, nut just Xen. So my question is: can Qubes in its current state be run under Hyper-V and if not, will it be possible in the not-too-distant future?

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

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On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 01:18:45PM -0700, grzegorz....@gmail.com wrote:
> With the release of Qubes 3.0 hypervisor abstraction layer was introduced, theoretically allowing Qubes to run under any hypervisor, nut just Xen. So my question is: can Qubes in its current state be run under Hyper-V and if not, will it be possible in the not-too-distant future?

Short answer: it requires some work which we don't have on our roadmap
for the near future. So - no.

Details:
Running Qubes on Hyper-V consists of two, mostly independent tasks
1. Making Qubes Admin/GUI Domain (dom0) working on Windows
2. Adding support for Hyper-V to VMM-specific components

The first one in practice means adding Windows support to our GUI
daemon. Other components have been working on Windows some time ago[1],
and while we don't actively maintain Windows support for dom0[2], it
shouldn't be hard to get it working again.

The second one means in practice:
- implementing vchan inter-VM communication library for Hyper-V
- enhancing libvirt hyper-v backend to have all the functionality we
need (which may be a null task if it already have it all)
- adding appropriate Hyper-V specific mechanism for shared memory to
GUI agent and daemon

Generally description what is needed for such configuration is already
in that blog post[1] - it still applies.

It's hard for me to estimate how much work it is for someone knowing
Windows and/or Hyper-V well. But surely much less than implementing all
the Qubes mechanisms from scratch ;)

[1]
http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2013/03/21/introducing-qubes-odyssey-framework.html
[2]
http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2014/01/15/shattering-myths-of-windows-security.html

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
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