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Can someone explain to me what this is for? The article explicitly mentions that it is not intended to emulate a machine like bochs/vmware or running windows on

by speeder 11y ago

Can someone explain to me what this is for? The article explicitly mentions that it is not intended to emulate a machine like bochs/vmware or running windows on linux... So what is this for? Everyone I talked about this subject or use it to run windows apps on *nix ( osx included ) or to create multiple servers in a single machine. What else a hypervisor can do? EDIT: for the people pointing me the motivation section... well, that is the section I am quoting in first place. I did read it, but the guy is awfully vague. And I never used a hypervisor before anyway, thus you can't assume I will understand random jargon.

martius 11y ago
There is a comprehensive "motivation" section on the linked page of the project.
givinguflac 11y ago
From the motivation section: Too many hypervisor projects out there are either extremely complicated (Xen, KVM, VirtualBox) and/or closed-source (VMware, Hyper-V), as well as heavily focused toward Linux-based development or system. Additionally, most (other than Hyper-V) of them are expressly built for the purpose of enabling the execution of virtual machines, and not the virtualization of a live, running system, in order to perform introspection or other security-related tasks on it.
- chocolatebunny 11y ago
  What exactly falls under the "other security-related tasks" section? The only thing I can think of would be for a privileged application to try and hide things from the OS.
  - halomru 11y ago
    Apart from being able to hide from the OS a hypervisor is also safe from manipulation by the OS and can observe and manipulate anything the OS does. This opens a few doors: debugging or reverse engineering the OS or kernel modules, sandboxing a system you don't trust, detecting rootkits, protecting your antivirus solution from malware, etc.
  - malka 11y ago
    You could use it to load an image abd inspect how it behaves maybe ?

by speeder 11y ago

martius 11y ago

There is a comprehensive "motivation" section on the linked page of the project.

givinguflac 11y ago

From the motivation section: Too many hypervisor projects out there are either extremely complicated (Xen, KVM, VirtualBox) and/or closed-source (VMware, Hyper-V), as well as heavily focused toward Linux-based development or system. Additionally, most (other than Hyper-V) of them are expressly built for the purpose of enabling the execution of virtual machines, and not the virtualization of a live, running system, in order to perform introspection or other security-related tasks on it.

chocolatebunny 11y ago
What exactly falls under the "other security-related tasks" section? The only thing I can think of would be for a privileged application to try and hide things from the OS.
- halomru 11y ago
  Apart from being able to hide from the OS a hypervisor is also safe from manipulation by the OS and can observe and manipulate anything the OS does. This opens a few doors: debugging or reverse engineering the OS or kernel modules, sandboxing a system you don't trust, detecting rootkits, protecting your antivirus solution from malware, etc.
- malka 11y ago
  You could use it to load an image abd inspect how it behaves maybe ?