Argo: Hypervisor-Mediated Exchange (HMX) for Xen

From Xen


Hypervisor Mediated Exchange (HMX)

The technologies provided by VMMs for communication between VMs have a critical impact on VM isolation properties, on the confidence components can have in the delivery of data and in the integrity of the data that is received. The video below identifies aspects of inter-VM communication system architecture that support important properties that are valuable for building secure systems. Terminology is introduced to enable classification of the existing body of art and survey relevant communication technologies in modern hypervisor, OS and microkernel systems. An example is presented — Argo, an inter-VM communication mechanism developed for the Xen hypervisor — and how it is distinguished from other communication channels on the Xen platform and elsewhere.

V4V (historical)

V4V was created for Citrix XenClient and derivatives are currently deployed in production systems for OpenXT and millions of HP/Bromium laptops with uXen and vSentry/SureClick.

Argo

Argo was derived from V4V, hypervisor patches were submitted to xen-devel in 2018 and merged in 2019 for Xen 4.12.

Note: Linux driver for Argo is not yet upstream.

Upstream

History

Related Work