Qubes OS 3.0 released

Joanna Rutkowska has announced the release of Qubes OS 3.0, which has a new hypervisor abstraction layer (HAL) as one of its "killer features". Qubes OS uses a hypervisor as part of its "security by compartmentalization" strategy for creating a more secure operating system. The HAL "will allow us to easily switch the underlying hypervisors in the near future, perhaps even during the installation time, depending on the user needs (think tradeoffs between hardware compatibility and performance vs. security properties desired, such as e.g. reduction of covert channels between VMs, which might be of importance to some users). More philosophically-wise, this is a nice manifestation of how Qubes OS is really "not yet another virtualization system", but rather: a user of a virtualization system (such as Xen)."We looked at Qubes OS 3.0 back in May.