Mailing List Archive

Requesting Xen community's feedback on unikernelized driver domains
Hello,

This email is to request Xen community's feedback on our work on implementing Xen’s driver domains using the unikernel virtual machine model (as opposed to using general-purpose OSs like Linux) to reduce the attack surface, among other benefits. The effort, called Kite, has implemented driver domains for network and storage PV drivers using NetBSD’s rumprun unikernel.

Details of the work are available in a paper that will soon appear at the 2022 ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys’22), available here: https://www.ssrg.ece.vt. edu/papers/eurosys22.pdf

Kite’s source code is available at: https://github.com/ssrg- vt/kite/.

We would love to hear the community’s thoughts and feedback.

Thank you, and looking forward,

Mehrab
Re: Requesting Xen community's feedback on unikernelized driver domains [ In reply to ]
On Sun, Mar 20, 2022 at 2:38 AM tosher 1 <akm2tosher@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> This email is to request Xen community's feedback on our work on
> implementing Xen’s driver domains using the unikernel virtual machine model
> (as opposed to using general-purpose OSs like Linux) to reduce the attack
> surface, among other benefits. The effort, called Kite, has implemented
> driver domains for network and storage PV drivers using NetBSD’s rumprun
> unikernel.
>
> Details of the work are available in a paper that will soon appear at the
> 2022 ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys’22), available
> here: https://www.ssrg.ece.vt. edu/papers/eurosys22.pdf
>
> Kite’s source code is available at: https://github.com/ssrg- vt/kite/.
>
> We would love to hear the community’s thoughts and feedback.
>

Looks like a great idea! If you're looking for technical feedback, or want
to discuss trying to integrate this with the larger Xen project somehow,
then posting this to xen-devel might be a better venue.

Would anyone be interested in writing up a blog post to put on
blog.xenproject.org? (Or, do you already have a blog post elsewhere we can
link to?)

-George
Re: Requesting Xen community's feedback on unikernelized driver domains [ In reply to ]
Hi George,

Thanks for the suggestions. I will post it to xen-devel mailing list.

We are working on preparing a blog post. I will let you know when we publish it.

Regards,
Mehrab








On Monday, March 21, 2022, 08:50:55 AM EDT, George Dunlap <dunlapg@umich.edu> wrote:







On Sun, Mar 20, 2022 at 2:38 AM tosher 1 <akm2tosher@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> This email is to request Xen community's feedback on our work on implementing Xen’s driver domains using the unikernel virtual machine model (as opposed to using general-purpose OSs like Linux) to reduce the attack surface, among other benefits. The effort, called Kite, has implemented driver domains for network and storage PV drivers using NetBSD’s rumprun unikernel.
>
> Details of the work are available in a paper that will soon appear at the 2022 ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys’22), available here: https://www.ssrg.ece.vt. edu/papers/eurosys22.pdf
>
> Kite’s source code is available at: https://github.com/ssrg- vt/kite/.
>
> We would love to hear the community’s thoughts and feedback.
>

Looks like a great idea!  If you're looking for technical feedback, or want to discuss trying to integrate this with the larger Xen project somehow, then posting this to xen-devel might be a better venue.

Would anyone be interested in writing up a blog post to put on blog.xenproject.org?  (Or, do you already have a blog post elsewhere we can link to?)

 -George