What Is Qubes OS?

Used to use Qubes OS, quit because I could not figure out how to move files / share files between VMs securely / easily.

Want to try again, but a little concerned that AWS seems to have moved away from Xen.

One of the points that look like a plus to me, was that Qubes OS was based on a widely used, battle tested hypervisor, Xen.

The biggest cloud platforms looks like AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. I should check if what hypervisors they are using.

Looking for AWS use of Xen and other hypervisors, to see if Xen is still widely used, but could not figure out if Xen will continued to be used, or if AWS is moving from Xen to KVM.

Some web searches that I have made were ...

* doc

https://github.com/awsdocs/amazon-ec2-user-guide-windows/tre...

  ... Nitro-based instance type, such as M5 or C5 ...
  ... instance based on the Xen System, such as M4 or C4 ...

* FAQ

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/

  Q. Will AWS continue to invest in its Xen-based hypervisor?
  Yes. ...

  Q. What is the Nitro Hypervisor?
  ... The Nitro Hypervisor is built on core Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology ...

> I am not sure how to interpret this. Maybe "Q. Will AWS continue to invest in its Xen-based hypervisor?" is a Marketing / PR way of phrasing something?

* Others

https://brendangregg.com/blog/2021-07-05/computing-performan... https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa21/presentation/gregg-... https://www.usenix.org/system/files/lisa21_slides_gregg_comp...

  VM Improvements
  #6 VM Xen AWS 2017
  #7 VM AWS Nitro 2017

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) looks like it does not use Xen, and only KVM. I could be wrong.

I cloud only find pages with mention of KVM, and no Xen.

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/nested-virtu...

  Compute Engine VMs run on a physical host that has Google's security-hardened, KVM-based hypervisor.

I thought Microsoft Azure used only Hyper-V, but doc page mentions used of KVM. I am not sure how to interpret this.

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/blob/main/articl...

  The hypervisors for preparation that are covered in this article are Hyper-V, kernel-based virtual machine (KVM), and VMware.
  KVM
  This section shows you how to use KVM to prepare a RHEL 6 or RHEL 7 distro to upload to Azure.

> Maybe this means that Azure is not using KVM, and only uses Hyper-V, but it can import KVM images?

> Used to use Qubes OS, quit because I could not figure out how to move files / share files between VMs securely / easily.

Is this what your're looking for? https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/how-to-copy-and-move-files/