Hvdos, a simple DOS emulator based on the OS X Hypervisor.framework

Re:Hvdos, a simple DOS emulator based on the OS X Hypervisor... by mrsteveman1 on Sunday January 04, 2015 @09:19PM (#8836801)

As someone else noted, QEMU is a likely match, perhaps another option for running Vagrant on OS X. But apple probably wouldn't go to this much effort and commit to supporting a hypervisor just to make virtualizing Linux easier. It's not an unmet need, and it's not their primary focus at all.

As you noted, all the existing VM players can provide their own and may want to continue doing that (unless Apple forces them to adopt this one... which is unlikely), so I'd bet on Apple itself being the primary consumer of it in some way.

As for what Apple itself might do with it in the future, perhaps this is just intended to be a low level component that will be used for other high level things in the OS itself, similar to the way XPC is now used all over the place as a core technology. As for what that might be with the hypervisor... I'd just be guessing. Guessing is fun though :)

They did say they were locking down /System soon, maybe that's going to be far more expansive than just the filesystem path, maybe a native hypervisor paired with VT-d allows them to "sandbox" things that currently can't be contained, even kexts? I'm thinking about Qubes OS when I say that http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubes_OS

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Re:Hvdos, a simple DOS emulator based on the OS X Hypervisor... by protomyth on Monday January 05, 2015 @03:33AM (#8837882)

Where did they say they are locking down /System ?

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Re:Hvdos, a simple DOS emulator based on the OS X Hypervisor... by mrsteveman1 on Monday January 05, 2015 @11:08AM (#8839452)

WWDC 2013 Session 707 "What's New in Kext Development" [1] is about kext signing and where 3rd party kexts should be placed in 10.9+. In the PDF slides you can see on slide 101:

"Get out of /System/Library/Extensions ... in fact ALL of /System (talk to us if you think you need to be here!)"

And then the major point which is only part of the spoken presentation and not IN the PDF itself:

"And another warning I'll throw out here is in the future as we start to lock down the /System folder, you might actually get write errors. So when you try to install a kernel extension into the /System folder, the write itself may fail."

That sounds like either read-only mounting of a separate partition, or kernel level write protection, or some similar solution.

If you want to read it instead of watching the video, you can visit the transcripts for this session over at asciiwwdc.com[2] and search for the phrase "lock down".

[1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2013/?id=707

[2] http://asciiwwdc.com/2013/sessions/707

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Re:Hvdos, a simple DOS emulator based on the OS X Hypervisor... by protomyth on Monday January 05, 2015 @02:54PM (#8840730)

Thanks, that is very good to know.

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