On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 9:58 AM, je <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thursday, April 20, 2017 at 10:50:58 AM UTC-4, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
>> On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 07:05:40AM -0700, je wrote:
>> > Intel GVT-g is Intels mediated pass-through technology for graphics
>> > virtualization. Mediated pass-through allows to share a graphics card
>> > with
>> > multiple guests [1]. Intel GVT-g was formerly known as XenGT. However,
>> > GVT-g was added to the mainline kernel 4.10 [2] and have since seen
>> > improvements [3].
>> >
>> > Are there any plans to support GVT-g in upcoming Qubes OS releases? Did
>> > you
>> > do any experiments with GVT-g and QubesOS?
>>
>> Currently not. While this may look very attractive, it also have a huge
>> attack surface - especially the mediating part running in device model.
>> There are at least two things to be concerned about:
>>  - exploiting some bug there to break out into dom0,
>>  - exploiting some bug there to steal/subvert data of other VM using the
>>    same GPU
>>
>>
>>
>> The first one could be somehow mitigated by sandboxing it in a separate
>> VM - like we do with qemu for HVM domains. But it wouldn't prevent the
>> second kind of attack, which is especially severe if you have only one
>> GPU.
>> This also require a lot of research what other parts of the system could
>> be affected by such a complex feature.
>>
>> This all doesn't mean we will never add such a feature - using this
>> technology, or some other future one. But probably it will not be
>> enabled by default. And surely it will not be in the near future - since
>> our resources are limited, we focus on things improving security of
>> Qubes OS, not loosening it.
>>
>>
>> > If you did not do any experiments with GVT-g and QubesOS, than I would
>> > really like to see a GSoC project which evaluates the Intel GVT-g
>> > technology in Qubes OS. Because Intel GVT-g could be maybe used to
>> > enable
>> > Android and WebGL development in Qubes OS. Furthermore, proper GPU
>> > acceleration support could improve or enable many use cases which
>> > require
>> > GPU acceleration.
>>
>> Well, this indeed may be a good candidate for GSoC project. I'm somehow
>> sceptical if this as a whole could be framed as such (IMO it's much more
>> than 3 months of work), but some parts probably yes. Anyway for this is
>> for the next year - deadline for projects submission for this year
>> already have passed.
>
>
> I think that GPU virtualization is a very new field. I would not consider
> this as a feature anytime soon in Qubes OS. However, I think Qubes OS should
> explore new technologies in this area soon as they appear. Currently it is
> not really possible to play games, use 3D rendering applications or use
> WebGL. I tried once to play a simple WebGL based tower game on Qubes OS. It
> was just painful. Whereas the same game was running very fast on an Alcatel
> OneTouch FirefoxOS phone
> (http://www.gsmarena.com/alcatel_one_touch_fire-5319.php). My Intel i7-3x
> running Qubes OS should have been able to surpass the performance of my
> phone by far.
>
> What I was thinking about is, to have a page for QubesOS with proposals
> which can be used for GSoC students, students or researches which have to
> write a thesis. We could call it Qubes OS Research Lab. The proposals should
> be around interesting and novel research topics in virtualization, such as
> GPU virtualization, Unikernels, separation of Desktop Environment and Dom0,
> introspection/forensics and many more. I think students would be interested
> to work on topics which allow them to contribute to an open source project
> and work together with a community.

There is the GSoC Ideas List page [1] which already lists many
projects similar to those you describe. Feel free to suggest more
ideas there in the form of pull requests against [2]. If you think it
should be split into categories (perhaps: "implementation
improvements", and "exploratory work" or so) then feel free to submit
a PR doing that as well.

Cheers,
Jean-Philippe (a person who started contributing to Qubes as a student)

[1]: https://www.qubes-os.org/gsoc/
[2]: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubesos.github.io/blob/master/pages/gsoc.md

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