Re: [developer] A couple of kernel questions

[Lonnie Cumberland <lonnie@outstep.com>]

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Hi All,

I have a follow up question on the illumos kernel.

Can the illumos kernel allow for VGA and Audio pass-through from a User 
Zone?  I am trying to discover how it might be possible to pass the 
console to a Zone that might be running a guest Bhyve and some how work 
out to have the guest OS using the console instead to the Global Zone.  
This is not really the same as using zlogin in text mode but I do not 
have a complete picture in my mind on what might be, or not, achievable 
from the kernel perspective.

I guess that this would be a similar question for GPU pass-through from 
a non-Global Zone.

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance,
Lonnie

On 7/17/2024 9:28 AM, Lonnie via illumos-developer wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> While still being new to Illumos (coming from the Linux/FreeBSD world) and ramping up a project that will be based upon either SmartOS, OmniOS, or Tribblix, and recently posted a question asking about the possibility and challenges to implement a type of application sandbox feature that seems to have some out in Solaris 11.4, I had just a couple of other questions for the developers list while I move to get set up to compile Illumos for some initial testing and explorations.
>
> 1. As Illumos is designed for zones (VMs), I am wondering if there are driver and service zones implemented such that if a driver crashes then it does not heavily impact the OS in operation?   From what I understand so far, the drivers and system wide services are installed in the Global-Zone which makes me think of the Xen Type-1 Hypervisor in which these things are installed in their Dom0 which is similar to the Illumos Global-Zone (GZ)
>
> 2. Another crazy thought that I had was about the possibly of investigating what it might take to (fork illumos for an experiment) and try to remove the dependencies on a hierarchal tree-based filesystem and to implement a type of "Property-Graph Database (PGDb)" filesystem.  The rationale here is that a hierarchal tree-based filesystem can easily be represented as well but that a PGDb filesystem also allows for assigning new types of attributes to files, blocks, objects, users, etc. and thus allowing for granular security on users at the application level.  Users can be allowed/disallowed to see/access application/files/block/objects and only authorized applications are "mapped" to a particular user.
>
> 3. I could see that when a user does a login, then a blank empty zones is set up at which time their configured files, directories are mapped in to their container zone and allowed applications are only used. The users cannot escape their zone and does not have access to the rest of the system unless privilege's are elevated.  I know that "zlogin" can do this from the GZ, but perhaps automatically and full console since graphic display will be needed.
>
> 4. One need that may be a challenge to get done will be the need for a enable/disable consoles such that a local users could use a hot-key (API call) to switch between zone consoles which would include graphics, audio, etc.   This would be akin to running multiple VirtualBox OSs, or VMware Guests in which you can step through the guest graphic tabs in fullscreen mode, perhaps. I am seeking to replicate that idea in Illumos to step through guests (maybe in Bhyve or native zones) that are in their own configured zone which is the thought.
>
> I am not sure how these things might be approached and/or tackled in illumos but wanted to start investigating them one by one and build up at the project evolves.
>
> There are a few other ideas that I have but namely the driving thoughts are on strict separation between applications and user data as well as user isolation while mapping in only the specific applications (which will also run sandboxed or in thin-zones) and data that are needed.  Its about build an extremely secure OS that minimized the attack-surface should drivers/applications/bad-actor users interact with the OS while still offering high configurability.
>
> Well, I thought that I would ask these questions here since they are more kernel related than OS configuration related and hope that you also find them interesting although may have already been considered in the past well.
>
> Best Regards and have a great day,
> Lonnie
>
>
> ------------------------------------------
> illumos: illumos-developer
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