Nesting a kernel under an unbreakable VM Is now possible with GunYeah! ARM8+ only

[Duke Abbaddon]

Nesting a kernel under an unbreakable VM Is now possible with GunYeah!
ARM8+ only

Rupert S https://bit.ly/VESA_BT

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=QuiC-Gunyah-Hypervisor-Linux-v1

Qualcomm Posts Linux Driver Patches For New "Gunyah" Hypervisor
Written by Michael Larabel in Virtualization on 24 February 2022 at
04:35 AM EST. 12 Comments
VIRTUALIZATION -- Qualcomm by way of their QuiC innovation center have
been developing Gunyah as an open-source type-1 hypervisor. Posted on
Wednesday were the initial patches providing Linux driver support for
Gunyah.

The Gunyah hypervisor code was originally published last year and to
date its public GitHib repo has seen just ten commits. Gunyah is
self-described there as:
Gunyah is a Type-1 hypervisor, meaning that it is independent of any
high-level OS kernel, and runs in a higher CPU privilege level. It
does not depend on any lower-privileged OS kernel/code for its core
functionality. This increases its security and can support a much
smaller trusted computing base than a Type-2 hypervisor.

Gunyah's design principle is not dissimilar to a traditional
microkernel in that it provides only a minimal set of critical
services to its clients, and delegates the provision of non-critical
services to non-privileged (or less-privileged) processes, wherever
this is possible without an adverse impact on performance or security.

The hypervisor uses the CPU's virtualization mode and features to
isolate itself from OS kernels in VMs. On ARM, this includes trapping
privileged registers, using GIC virtualization support, and the
Stage-2 MMU to provide isolated VMs in EL1/0.

The primary focuses of Gunyah are on providing strong security,
performance especially for mobile devices and delivering efficient
battery life, and being of a modular design.At the moment Gunyah can
only target ARMv8.2+ hardware with no other architectures supported
and older AArch64 hardware not being supported due to depending upon
EL2 in VHE mode. With mentioning mobile devices, only targeting newer
AArch64, and being developed by Qualcomm/QuIC, this hypervisor does
seem to be focused for mobile use-cases moving forward.

Sent out on Wednesday were these 11 patches for the Linux kernel
providing Gunyah hypervisor driver support. The QuIC patch series sums
it up as, "This series adds the initial support for Gunyah hypercalls,
IPC via message queues, communication with the Gunyah Resource Manager
to enable Gunyah's paravirtualized console."

We'll see how much interesr or adoption of Gunyah there is moving forward.
12 Comments