Objective of OpenWRT/x86?

[Daniel Golle]

On Mon, May 01, 2023 at 09:01:29AM -0600, Philip Prindeville wrote:
> 
> 
> > On May 1, 2023, at 8:12 AM, Joseph Mullally <jwmullally at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > On Mon, May 1, 2023 at 5:43 AM Philip Prindeville
> > <philipp_subx at redfish-solutions.com> wrote:
> >>> On Apr 28, 2023, at 11:18 PM, Elliott Mitchell <ehem+openwrt at m5p.com> wrote:
> >>>> On Fri, Apr 28, 2023 at 12:04:15PM -0600, Philip Prindeville wrote:
> > 
> >>>> Um... you can't "virtualize" WiFi in any VM I've ever seen.
> >>> 
> >>> You can though pass PCIe devices to a VM.  The hardware will physically
> >>> attach to the control host, but a VM will be able to do anything it wants
> >>> with it.
> >> 
> >> So the guest has the potential to crash or hang the host?
> > 
> > I ran the OpenWrt x86/64 image under KVM/libvirtd for years with an
> > Intel Wifi card connected through exclusive PCI passthrough, and it
> > worked fine. There is enough conjecture already.
> 
> 
> From one anecdotal episode I'm not going to extrapolate that this is a robust solution in all cases; I wouldn't get very far as a cyber security engineer thinking this way.

Maybe the fact that PCI passthrough is facilitated by the IOMMU which
takes care of resource isolation makes you feel a bit better about it?
The host from this point on doesn't deal with that PCIe slot any more,
and passtrough is happening entirely in hardware.

However, keep in mind that access to PCIe in most cases (such as WiFi
adapters) doesn't assume the user could be a bad actor. You will probably
still be able to do bad things with it, esp. if you know the hardware
well (such as triggering overheat/overcurrent, deliberately creating
radio interference with other system parts, ...).