Re: write news article about virtual kernel

["Dmitri Nikulin" <dnikulin@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 1/28/07, Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> wrote:
>     No.  Frankly I do not think it is a good idea to allow any
>     production virtualization mechanism to ever have direct access
>     to hardware.  It destroys the layering that gives virtualization
>     stability and security... no matter how good the implement is.
>
>     As a debugging tool it might be useful, but that is about as
>     far as I would ever consider taking it.

That's what I was saying: It's a debugging tool to develop a driver,
and once it's "done", it can just be loaded into the host kernel
instead of the virtual kernel. If that virtual kernel is there for the
express purpose of hosting drivers and not untrusted processes and
users, then security isn't any worse than keeping it in the host
kernel. Maybe it's even more secure if a buggy driver which could have
taken over the kernel will instead only take over the virtual kernel,
or (more likely) fail entirely and get a segfault. It has practical
uses if the use-case of sandboxing processes is kept well separate
from sandboxing drivers, but yes, it does have to be implemented well
to be useful at all even for debugging.

---
Dmitri Nikulin

Centre for Synchrotron Science
Monash University
Victoria 3800, Australia

email: dnikulin@gmail.com