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Re:A State of Xen – Chaos Monkey and Cassandra by RyanGWU82 on Friday October 03, 2014 @01:32AM (#8404423)
Amazon rebooted lots of PV guests. Presumably they collocate HVM and PV guests on the same box. If there were any HVM guests on the box, then there could be the possibility of an attack. (I guess they could forcibly kick off the HVM guests, but that wouldn't be very nice.)

Why shouldn't Netflix be running on HVM?

Re:A State of Xen – Chaos Monkey and Cassandra by lsc on Friday October 03, 2014 @01:44AM (#8404437)
>Why shouldn't Netflix be running on HVM?

HVM, at least in the past, had a bunch more code that the guest DomU interacts with vs. fully pv guests. This has security implications.

Now, my knowledge of HVM is a few years... or more like half a decade out of date, for example, I don't even know how to force a HVM guest to only use PV drivers (which would solve 90% of the problem.) and i know that more and more of this has moved into hardware, so it's possible that what was true five years ago is not true now, but... yeah, I don't let untrusted users on HVM guests for the same reason I don't let untrusted users use pygrub or load untrusted kernels directly.

Re:A State of Xen – Chaos Monkey and Cassandra by grosskur on Friday October 03, 2014 @03:54AM (#8404658)
Most people agree HVM is the way to go on EC2:

http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-07/what-color-is-yo...

Forcing an HVM guest to use only PV drivers sounds like PVH, which is coming in Xen 4.4:

https://blog.xenproject.org/2014/01/31/linux-3-14-and-pvh/

Re:A State of Xen – Chaos Monkey and Cassandra by cthalupa on Friday October 03, 2014 @04:36PM (#8407508)
HVM guests at Amazon will default to using PV drivers for IO and networking. (Unless using SRIOV/"Enhanced Networking", which will not use the PV drivers)

PVH is actually PV on top of an HVM container and is a bit different. You can think of it as PV sitting on top of enough HVM bits to take advantage of the hardware extensions Intel and AMD have invested so heavily in while still being majority PV. This gives you the best of both worlds, including the remaining PV performance benefits related to interrupts and timers that PV drivers on HVM can't utilize.

Re:A State of Xen – Chaos Monkey and Cassandra by lsc on Friday October 03, 2014 @04:05AM (#8404682)
hm. thanks. Yeah. I need to spend more time on this as I update my stuff.
Re:A State of Xen – Chaos Monkey and Cassandra by timoth on Friday October 03, 2014 @06:24AM (#8404923)
For network and storage at least, Amazon says that their HVM guests use PV drivers according to this page:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-...

but on this page, they don't say that specifically, but mention the possibility in the PV on HVM section:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/virtualiz...

Perhaps/presumably it also depends on the AMI you're using.