zlacker

>>ploggi+(OP)
Their weakest point is the hypervisor, Xen, which while a better choice than Linux/KVM, is still extremely bloated and has a poor security history.

Thankfully, better designs such as seL4's VMM do exist, although it might need a little more work [1] until usable for the purpose.

[1] https://sel4.systems/Info/Roadmap/

>>snvzz+D3
Xen's hypervisor's size is very small. Qubes is about security and trustability of the whole system. In operating systems for measuring the trustability of the system, one very important measure is the lines of the code. Xen has a smaller footprint in the hypervisor part. Additionally, Xen has a robust model isolation for the drivers. That's why they went for Xen not KVM. But boy I wish to see more seL4. It was sad to see Gnu Hurd/seL4 didn't make it.

>>mmreza+d5
The problem with Xen is that no major industry player is backing it, especially with Amazon going KVM now.

(disclaimer: working at Google on virtualization security)

>>xyzzyz+t5
I was under the (possibly outdated) impression that Amazon wasn't really backing Xen much anyway, so AWS changing hypervisors might not mean much to Xen anyway.

I haven't used Xen for a while, but seemed to recall that Amazon forked it way back in the 3.x days and had been doing their own incompatible thing with it since then.

Corrections welcome of course :)