Existing Ports of and Porting Whonix ™ to other Architectures

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• Opening Ports in Whonix
• Porting Whonix to other Architectures
• Porting Whonix to other Virtualizers

Architecture specific packages in Whonix ™. "Special packages". Software maintained by third parties. Compiled software. Kernel modules. Shared objects. Tips on porting Whonix ™ to other platforms. "amd64" means Intel and AMD. Porting Simplicity.

Existing Ports of Whonix ™

• Whonix ™ reported to be running on POWER9 (OpenPOWER), Raptor Talos II using distro-morphing.
• Inoffical Whonix ™ Docker port. Not reviwed by Whonix ™ developers.
  • https://forums.whonix.org/t/running-whonix-on-kvm-in-linux-containers/14048
  • https://github.com/nspin/whonix-now
• Some other Whonix ™ on github. Docker ports of on github.

Incomplete Ports of Whonix ™

• Whonix for arm64 / Raspberry Pi ( RPi ) (wiki) (broken, unsupported)
• Whonix on Mac M1 (ARM) based: project status / forum discussion

Existing Ports of Kicksecure ™

• ppc64el Kicksecure ™ functional, created using distro-morphing on a test server for Whonix ™ developer Patrick.
• Distro-morphing should generate viable images for KVM on arm64.

Packages

NOTE

amd64 might imply AMD only. This is wrong.

amd64 means Intel and AMD.

For technical reasons, in Debian (and in many other Linux / Freedom Software related places) both, Intel and AMD, is called amd64. This is common knowledge without controversy among technical people, in doubt see Wikipedia X86-64.

Porting Simplicity

To simplify ports to other architectures, all of the following packages are optional dependencies. These packages have very useful functionality however to simplify bootstrapping a port of Whonix ™ for a quick motivational milestone to reach of Whonix ™ building and booting, all architecture specific packages are optional dependencies by design in Whonix ™.

Therefore porters do not need to worry about any of the following packages during original porting work.

Most of Whonix ™ packages and all essential packages are architecture independent.

To simplify ports, Whonix ™ repository at time of writing supports the following architectures.

amd64 arm64 armel armhf hurd-i386 hurd-amd64 i386 kfreebsd-amd64 kfreebsd-i386 mips mipsel powerpc ppc64 ppc64el s390x sparc source

This might be useful for distro-morphing.

Distro-morphing might be the easiest way to create a proof of concept port of Whonix ™. Following the spirit of Self Support First Policy, first experimenting with Debian (which Whonix ™ is based on) first might be helpful.

A production quality, redistributable port of Whonix ™ however should be created using Whonix ™ build script instead of distro-morphing.

Related: porting Whonix ™ to other virtualizers

bindp

• maintained by third party: yes
• compiled: yes
• compiled when: at package installation time / at Whonix ™ build time
• language: C
• no upstream version number
• documentation: none
• upstream: https://github.com/yongboy/bindp
• package source code: https://github.com/Kicksecure/bindp
• kernel module: no

lkrg

• maintained by third party: yes
• compiled: yes
• compiled when: at package installation time / at Whonix ™ build time (if it was pre-installed)
• language: C
• version number by upstream: yes
• upstream architecture support: amd64 only
• documentation: Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG)
• upstream: https://lkrg.org/
• Debian package source code: https://github.com/Kicksecure/lkrg
• kernel module: yes
• LKRG Development Discussion

kloak

• maintained by third party: yes
• compiled: yes
• compiled when: during package build process / at Whonix ™ build time
• version number by upstream: yes
• architecture support: ?
  • https://github.com/vmonaco/kloak/issues/24
  • https://github.com/vmonaco/kloak/issues/25
• documentation: kloak
• upstream: https://github.com/vmonaco/kloak
• Debian package source code: https://github.com/Whonix/kloak
• kernel module: no
• Kloak Forum Discussion

corridor

• maintained by third party: yes
• compiled: no
• language: sh
• version number by upstream: yes
• upstream architecture support: any
• documentation: Corridor
• upstream: https://github.com/rustybird/corridor
• Debian package source code: https://github.com/Whonix/corridor
• kernel module: no
• corridor Development Discussion

Hardened Malloc

Hardened Memory Allocator

• maintained by third party: yes
• compiled: yes
• language: C
• compiled when: at package build time / at Whonix ™ build time (if it was pre-installed)
• version number by upstream: yes
• upstream architecture support: amd64 only
• documentation: Hardened Malloc
• upstream: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/hardened_malloc
• Debian package source code: https://github.com/Kicksecure/hardened_malloc
• kernel module: no
• Hardened Malloc Development Discussion
• arm64 issue: ticket says closed but is still an issue as per this comment https://github.com/GrapheneOS/hardened_malloc/issues/149#issuecomment-1010526647

monero-gui

• maintained by third party: yes
• compiled: yes
• compiled when: when upstream compiles it, the monero-gui package contains binaries aqquired from upstream (digital software signature verification is being performed during the packaging process)
• version number by upstream: yes
• upstream architecture support: amd64 only (?)
• documentation: Monero
• upstream: https://github.com/monero-project/monero-gui
• Debian package source code: https://gitlab.com/Kicksecure/monero-gui
• kernel module: no

tb-updater

• maintained by third party: no
• compiled: no
• contains binaries: no, because it is a downloader script
• language: bash
• version number by upstream: no
• architecture support:
  • i386 and amd64
    • For the Linux platform The Tor Project is only providing i386 and amd64 downloads. See https://dist.torproject.org/torbrowser/.
  • arm64 -> https://forums.whonix.org/t/arm64-tor-browser/11806
• Debian package source code: https://github.com/Kicksecure/tb-updater
• kernel module: no

tirdad

• maintained by third party: yes
• compiled: yes
• compiled when: at package installation time / at Whonix ™ build time
• version number by upstream: upstream does not (yet) provide version numbers
• architecture support: amd64 only
• documentation: TODO
• upstream: https://github.com/0xsirus/tirdad
• Debian package source code: https://github.com/Kicksecure/tirdad
• kernel module: yes
• tirdad Development Discussion

binaries-freedom

• Currently not in use.

tor

• Architectures amd64, i386 and arm64 are using the deb.torproject.org tor package. A newer version. The latest stable version provided by The Tor Project for the stable release of Debian. Why? See Dev/Tor and https://forums.whonix.org/t/tor-package-urgently-needs-update-to-v0-4-6-8-due-to-tor-browser-11-stable-fingerprintability/12762.
• Architectures other than amd64, i386 and arm64 are using the packages.debian.org tor package. An older version. The frozen stable version provided by Debian for Debian stable. This has a disadvantage: https://forums.whonix.org/t/tor-package-urgently-needs-update-to-v0-4-6-8-due-to-tor-browser-11-stable-fingerprintability/12762
• package maintained by third party: yes
• compiled during package build process: no
• contains binaries: yes
• version number by upstream: yes

Check Tor SocksPort Reachability

On Whonix-Workstation ™. Test.

{{Curl_Plain}} 10.152.152.10:9100 ; echo $?

Should show.

<html>
<head>
<title>Tor is not an HTTP Proxy</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Tor is not an HTTP Proxy</h1>
<p>
It appears you have configured your web browser to use Tor as an HTTP proxy.
This is not correct: Tor is a SOCKS proxy, not an HTTP proxy.
Please configure your client accordingly.
</p>
<p>
See <a href="https://www.torproject.org/documentation.html">https://www.torproject.org/documentation.html</a> for more information.
<!-- Plus this comment, to make the body response more than 512 bytes, so      IE will be willing to display it. Comment comment comment comment      comment comment comment comment comment comment comment comment.-→
</p>
</body>
</html>
0

Otherwise, it would be a grave error (Tor SocksPort not reachable).

Check CPFP Reachability

On Whonix-Workstation ™. Test.

{{Curl_Plain}} 10.152.152.10:9052

Should show.

510 Prohibited command "GET / HTTP/1.1"
510 Prohibited command "User-Agent: curl/7.26.0"
510 Prohibited command "Host: 10.152.152.10:9052"
510 Prohibited command "Accept: */*"
510 Unrecognized command ""

Otherwise, it would be a grave error (CPFP not reachable).

Forum Discussion

https://forums.whonix.org/t/architecture-specific-compiled-third-party-special-packages-porting-whonix/8562

RPM

These are some random notes about porting Whonix ™ update debs to rpm.

What would have to be done:

• create rpm package
• Find a replacement for config-package-dev, a package which allows third party packages (Whonix ™) to own files which are owned by other packages. Such as /etc/tor/torrc is owned by tor, but anon-gw-anonymizer-config includes its own config file.
• add init scripts (currently done by debhelper)
• add man pages (currently done by debhelper and ronn, see debian/rules)
• minor: replacement for dh_apparmor

Footnotes

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