Re: [Publicity] [Xen-devel] The Bitdefender virtual machine introspection library is now on GitHub

[Lars Kurth <lars.kurth.xen@xxxxxxxxx>]

> On 29 Jul 2015, at 11:36, Razvan Cojocaru <rcojocaru@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> On 07/29/2015 11:37 AM, Lars Kurth wrote:
>>>> Once done, save the article as draft, and post the link here on this
>>>> list (publicity@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx), for review.
>>> 
>>> Alright, will do!
>> 
>> Do you have an idea regarding timing? We have another post that is being 
>> worked on, so I wanted to make sure that we don't publish the articles in 
>> the same week
> 
> I've saved the post to Drafts as instructed, here's the preview link:
> 
> https://blog.xenproject.org/?p=10850&preview=true
> 
> Please let me know how to proceed.

Thank you. We will wait for 1-2 days to get feedback, you may need to make some 
modifications and then we agree on a publication date.

The title could maybe be made more interesting. Maybe Sarah has some ideas. 

> We’re very happy to announce that the library we’ve created to help us 
> perform virtual 
> machine introspection is now on GitHub, under the LGPLv3 license, here. The 
> library is 
> x86-specific, and while there’s some #ifdeferry suggesting that the earliest 
> supported 
> version is Xen 4.3, only Xen 4.6 will work out-of-the-box with it.

I think you may need a little bit more introduction and context here. If 
someone has not followed your work on xen-devel@ (and those of others in the 
same area), it is not really clear what you refer to. Consequently a reader may 
not get past the first paragraph.

Maybe start with some of your work in Xen and the primary use-case(s) within 
VMI you are trying to solve before that paragraph. It is also OK to refer to 
commercial products/presentations/etc. as long as the post doesn't become a 
product pitch (which I don't think it would)

> While LibVMI is great, and has been considered for the task, it has slightly 
> different design 
> goals: for best results, the user needs to use external Python tools to 
> extract guest information, 

I am assuming you refer to best results for LibVMI?

> usesGlib for caching (which adds to client applications’ dependencies), and 
> it doesn’t allow mapping 
> of guest pages from userspace (so that we could write to them directly).

> Libbdvmi aims to provide a very efficient way of working with Xen to access 
> guest information in an 
> OS-agnostic manner:
I would also mention Libbdvmi in the "We’re very happy to announce that th ..." 
paragraph, such that 
the name can be referenced. And than maybe say: "In contrast, Libbdvmi ..." or 
something like it

On the bullet points you list: is it correct to say that Libbdvmi is more 
tightly integrated with the recent VMI-Xen work (and Xen in general) and 
smaller compared to LibVMI? 

That may lead someone to raise the question why you are not trying to upstream 
the functionality into LibVMI. You may want to tackle this upfront, in 
particular because we moved from mem-access (Xen) to LibVMI (generic) and now a 
more Xen specific variant. Not having followed this in detail, I was also 
wondering whether Libbdvmi a complete re-write or based on LibVMI. 

> We hope that the community will find it useful, and welcome discussion!
Concrete calls for action usually work better. You may want to make this more 
concrete.  

Best Regards
Lars
_______________________________________________
Publicity mailing list
Publicity@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xenproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/publicity