On Thu, 2017-06-08 at 14:32 +0200, Kashyap Thimmaraju wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm Kashyap Thimmaraju, a second year PhD student at TU Berlin in
> Germany. This is my first post here, and I'm a Xen newbie.
> 
> I saw George Dunlap's presentation "Securing Your Xen-Based Cloud" at
> the LinuxCon on youtube recently as I am interested in using the
> driver domain for networking.
> 
> In the presentation he proposed placing the network driver  and
> forwarding functionality (bridge, iptables, etc.) into a (network)
> driver domain. This is indeed good for security.
> 
> However, I am curious if people are really adopting such an approach.
> Are there cloud providers or PV vendors deploying such an
> architecture? If so, is there any impact on the networking
> performance
> of say VM-VM or VM-Internet traffic?
> 
I'm not aware of any cloud providers doing that (but, that's mostly
because there's not much info about how cloud providers configure their
infrastructure).

Driver domains and stubdomains are hugely used in contexts targeting
really strong security, like Qubes and OpenXT:

https://www.qubes-os.org/
http://openxt.org/

Qubes targets laptops. I've tried it on mine, which is quite old, and
the drop in perf, e.g., wrt a regular (as in, one that does not use
virtualization at all) Linux desktop, although present, I don't think
it comes too much from the driver domain(s).

I haven't run any benchmarks with it, but despite (as I said) the
laptop being quite old, the system is definitely usable.

I know less of OpenXT. The picture int the front page mentions multi-
tenancy (although, it also mention 'clients').

Regards,
Dario
-- 
<<This happens because I choose it to happen!>> (Raistlin Majere)
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Dario Faggioli, Ph.D, http://about.me/dario.faggioli
Senior Software Engineer, Citrix Systems R&D Ltd., Cambridge (UK)