Re: [Qemu-devel] feature idea: allow user to run custom scripts

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 11:53:50AM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On 30 September 2015 at 09:14, Dr. David Alan Gilbert
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> > * Markus Armbruster (address@hidden) wrote:
> >> In my opinion, QEMU should leave them to separate GUI shells, because
> >> doing everything in QEMU distracts from our core mission and we don't
> >> have GUI expertise[*].  One more point: building in the GUI is
> >> problematic when you don't trust the guest, because then you really want
> >> to run QEMU with least privileges.
> >
> > Given that we have a built in GUI then I can see people wanting to expand
> > it.
> 
> Right, but where do you draw the line? We clearly don't have the
> active maintainer and review capacity to do anything serious with
> "ui/" (MAINTAINERS lists everything except SPICE as Odd Fixes).
> 
> This is why I tend to agree with Markus' opinion here: we should
> provide enough graphical UI to make raw QEMU minimally usable,
> and leave further user-friendliness to other projects which have
> more direct interest in that.
> 
> If we had more regular contributors who were actively interested
> in improving our UI layer my opinion might be different.

Even if we had more contributors interested in that, I still think
that we should not do it, because building a UI into QEMU is a
fundamentally bad design / architecture. QEMU is a security
sensitive component and we want to know the boundaries of what
a guest exploit can achieve - including a GUI massively expands
the attack surface making it more or less impossible to confine
any QEMU exploit, even with tools like SELinux/AppArmour, because
you have to allow use of the desktop protocol at which point you
can just talk to a separate app to perform the exploit.

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: http://berrange.com      -o-    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org              -o-             http://virt-manager.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: http://entangle-photo.org       -o-       http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|