Hyperlaunch
Hyperlaunch is a new, flexible system for launching the Xen hypervisor and virtual machines.
The design enables seamless transition for existing systems that require a dom0, and provides a new general capability to build and launch alternative configurations of virtual machines, including support for static partitioning and accelerated start of VMs during host boot, while adhering to the principles of least privilege. It incorporates the existing dom0less functionality, extended to fold in the new developments from the DomB project, with support for both x86 and Arm platform architectures, building upon and replacing the earlier 'late hardware domain' feature for disaggregation of dom0.
Hyperlaunch is designed to be flexible and reusable across multiple use cases, and our aim is to ensure that it is capable, widely exercised, comprehensively tested, and well understood by the Xen community.
- Version 4 of the Hyperlaunch Design Document - posted May 2021
- Device Tree Design Document for Version 4
- Hyperlaunch: A New Start for Xen - Keynote at the Xen Summit 2021 video
- XSM Roles: A New Role Model for Xen - at the Xen Summit 2021 video
- Design Session at the Xen Summit 2021 video
- Minutes of working group meeting, 18th March 2021
- Hypervisor code developed for the hyperlaunch prototype, initial development milestone
DomB mode of dom0less
- Xen Summit 2019: Keynote: Xen Dom0-less
- Embedded Linux Conference 2019: Static Partitioning Made Simple
- xen-devel, June 2018: RFC: Boot domain, DomB
- Dec 2019 design meeting in Cambridge
- May 2020 domB design doc v1
- Xen Summit 2020 Talk video: Xen System Boot: Launching VMs (DomB)
- Xen Summit 2020 Design Session video: Next steps for Xen system boot: launching VMs (DomB)
Related work
- TrenchBoot and Dynamic Root of Trust for Measurement (DRTM)
- OpenXT & Boot Integrity references
- Platform Security Summit 2018 videos
- Platform Security Summit 2019 videos
