What is the crowd's opinion of Xen?

From 3.5 billion comments

Whatever Host OS you choose, I'd stick with one for which Oracle actually releases / maintains binary packages for, unless you want to deal with compiling Virtual Box from source. Otherwise, if you are sticking with Linux, pick any distro you want and go nuts. You can strip down any distro of choice as much as you want.

>i should prob also mention im using a 2.5" ssd connected over usb 3.0, NOT the internal SATA.

Well doing that you are going to incur a performance hit vs. using a NVMe SSD, or a SATA3 SSD attached natively. Generally speaking, USB3 has far less bandwidth than NVMe, and the performance of a SATA device attached to USB3 through a SATA-USB bridge will be affected by any associated overhead associated with said bridge. You'll want to play with the "host cache" option, and "virtio-scsi" hard drive controller with your VMs, for better disk I/O in your VMs, if said said Guest OSs support them.

​

> i dont actually plan on using the host for anything; i want to run my daily driver from within a guest.

Then I'd suggest that you should consider a different hypervisor. What you are proposing (i.e. a lightweight Host OS + Plus Hypervisor, with everything else being run in VMs), describes Xen (https://xenproject.org/) to a T.

While arch can be used, it's not advised to use it as a hypervisor since arch uses bleeding edge packages. Instead, you can use something like Xen, or you can use QEMU inside Debian server/Ubuntu server which can be easier for beginners while still being lightweight. Finally, there is KVM as well. You need to check all 3 and decide which one suites your need.

My preference: Debian + QEMU

Mainly preference to be honest, and xen should be in all package managers at this point.

The xen I'm advocating if the oss version, not the citrix branded xensource ( may have changed names at this point). Can't verify on mobile, but this is the download page: https://xenproject.org/downloads/xen-project-archives/xen-project-4-14-series/xen-project-4-14-0/

I've had a lot of good experience with xen as well, i found it incredibly easy to use and manage

I think OP is just experimenting with the project within a Virtual Machine. The Bedrock Linux itself doesn't use VM technologies. There's another project called Qubes OS that's more along those lines, utilizing Xen.

Xen is a very common and established virtualization hypervisor. Here is the landing page for Xen's high level security. Their security documentation is extensive, but that should be a start. Notably, here is their policy on vulnerability discovery.