I was wondering how I could setup a Hypervisor environment that boots an operating system in in a sandboxed¹ mode, without relying on a (full blown) host (Dom0) operating system. The target application is implementing a physical², or "layer-0" honeypot³. Effectively the system should behave like your regular setup; listing the configured devices reports the actual hardware of the system; interfaces (network, USB, etc.) behave just normally; configuring the W-LAN is possible and so on. The major difference is, that nothing is stored permanently.
With a Linux host OS one could use qemu-kvm with a CoW snapshotting harddisk image that gets deleted after shutting down the VM. However I'd like to avoid the host OS; a lightweight shim system that provides the storage virtualization and otherwise passes through the rest of the HW would be ideal.
[1]: Changes made within the virtualized environment are not permanent; after a reboot the system is reverted to its initial state.
[2]: Think of an kiosk system, or a machine pretending to be something interesting.
[3]: Hence trying to avoid having a host OS, which could be a give away. In a similar fashion I'd like to avoid a Live-CD ramdisk based system.
