Running XSM-enabled Xen

Switching from a regular Xen deployment to an XSM-enabled Xen deployment is a matter of rebuilding Xen with XSM support and rebooting the system. Xen comes with an out-of-the-box policy that can be readily applied, which we will use as part of our XSM endeavor.

Rebuilding Xen with XSM support

Let's rebuild the Xen hypervisor and tools on the system with XSM support:

1. Clean up the previous build by running the make clean command inside the build directory (xen-4.13.1 in our example):

   $ make clean

2. Inside the build directory, go to the xen directory:

   $ cd xen

3. Launch the Xen configuration using make menuconfig:

   $ make menuconfig

4. Navigate to the XSM setting and enable the XSM-related parameters:

   Common Features --->
     [*] Xen Security Modules support
     [*]   FLux Advanced Security Kernel support
     [*]     Compile Xen with a built-in FLAS security 
      ...