About 5 months after the initial release of Qubes 3.0-rc1, we’re now releasing the final 3.0 today!
Let me quickly recap the main “killer features” of Qubes OS 3.0 compared to the Release 2:
-
Qubes is now based on what we call Hypervisor Abstraction Layer (HAL), which decouples Qubes logic from the underlying hypervisor. This 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).