Whonix VirtualBox Paravirtualization - Which Acceleration Mode is Optimal? Help Wanted!

VirtualBox
1

What will be the optimal paravirtualization setting for Whonix?

  • none: explicitly turns off exposing any paravirtualization interface sounds good security wise but could be really slow. Please test and leave feedback.
  • minimal: sounds like a worthwhile alternative if none is too slow. But what technology is minimal actually using? VirtualBox legacy or kvm? However, documentation says, it lets the VM read the APIC frequency. To be researched how bad this would be.
  • legacy is good enough for now. That’s like VirtualBox 4.x. But since they now call it legacy, that code will rot, and probably should be avoided in long run.
  • kvm (VirtualBox) is problematic, since it provides unwanted pvclock kvm-clock. (Which allows a clock correlation attacks once VM is compromised.
  • Does not seem like pvclocks can be configured in VirtualBox. (With linux libvirt kvm it’s possible.)
  • clock correlation attack
  • However, this presupposes that users did read and apply spoof the initial virtual clock offset beforehand, which probably few do.
  • Therefore probably not a big issues.
  • default is problematic, since in some cases, it does autodetection, then used VirtualBox KVM.
  • hyperv The microsoft thingy. No idea about that one. May or may not be great for Linux guests (Whonix).

Each virtualization platform should be reviewed for performance, security, pvclock interfaces and hardware identifiers readable by the vm. Please try various settings. Most interesting for now are none and minimal. Post the following in the forum discussion thread on this topic.

  1. Host OS name: Debian, Windows 10, Gentoo, etc.
  2. Host OS architecture: 64 or 32 Bit
  3. Whonix Version - only 11, or better.
  4. VirtualBox Version used - only VirtualBox, or better VirtualBox Acceleration Mode Used
  5. Notable Observations - errors, warnings. slowness, failures, etc.
  6. Does watching online videos such as youtube still work?
  7. Does watching videos in VLC still work?
  8. Open a console window. Post the output of. cat
    /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource
  9. And the output of. cat
    /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/available_clocksource
    10- Any other ‘things’ you deem important.

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